DISCLAIMER: You all know the drill - Paramount is God.  All hail Paramount.  They own everything in the Star Trek Universe - I'm just using my overactive imagination to take their characters where they refuse to go.  All in the name of fun, not profit (I wish).

CAUSALITY

CHAPTER SIX: CONSEQUENCES

"According to my scans," said Harry, pointing on the monitor, "The tunnels extend for a radius of two kilometers below this facility."

Chakotay looked up and glared at Shoval.  "Why didn't you mention these tunnels?"

Shoval shrugged.  "They're abandoned and unstable.  To my knowledge, no one has been down there for years."

He turned to Harry.  "Have you tried scanning for her?"

"The radiation levels are too high.  The best we'll have is limited tricorder scans."

Tom snorted.  "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.  This could take forever."

"We've got things under control for now," said B'Elanna.  "I can guarantee you twenty minutes.  No more."

"You've got to be kidding," said Tom.

She crossed her arms.  "I'm not.  This thing is going to overload and there's nothing I can do to stop it.  The only reason it didn't go critical an hour ago is that we managed to reinforce the containment field."

"Tom," said Chakotay, pointing at the diagram, "You take a team and check out these tunnels.  I'll cover these ones."

"Twenty minutes," repeated B'Elanna.

"You expect us to just leave if we haven't found her?" said Tom.

"We don't know for sure that she's even down there," Harry reminded him.

"Let's go," said Chakotay.

"Taman would like one of our security teams to accompany you," said Shoval.

"That won't be necessary."

Shoval's eyes narrowed.  "We insist."

*

"Something wrong?" asked the Captain as her double looked around the cave warily.

She looked back at her.  "The device I planted should have gone off by now."

"How do you know it hasn't?"

"We should have been able to hear the alarms.  There's a ventilation shaft near here."

"Maybe your device didn't work."

"I spent months building it.  It will work."

"Maybe you underestimated B'Elanna."

Her counterpart stopped pacing and turned around.  "What do you mean?"

She crossed her arms.  "Temporal mechanics 101.  You introduced a new variable into a causality loop.  There's no telling how that will change things.  Maybe B'Elanna found your device and disarmed it."

Her face clouded over.  "If that's true…"

"If that's true, then you should let me out of here so I can go shut down the core."

"You mean evacuate it."

"You said your anti-chronoton idea would work.  All I have to do is avoid Taman."

The elder Janeway stared at her for several seconds before she moved towards her, squatting in front of her so their faces were level.  "You still don't get it, do you?"  She sighed.  "You don't understand what it was like, Captain.  Being alone for five years.  I'm not going to take the risk that this will happen again."

"What if holding me here causes more deaths?"  She stood up and turned her back on her without answering.  "Have you considered that the crew might be looking for me?"

The elder Janeway eyed her guardedly over her shoulder.  "It's a risk I had to take.  But if they're looking for you that means they're nowhere near the reactor."

"It seems you've thought of everything."

"Five years is a long time to plan something," she said quietly.  "And it kept my mind off…everything else."

"I can imagine."

"No," she snapped, "You can't.  I don't think you have any idea what it was like."  She thought for a moment.  "Remember when Voyager traveled through the Void?"

"Of course," she said tersely.

"Remember when we first encountered the Borg…your disagreement with Chakotay?"  She moved towards her younger double and squatted again so they were at eye level with each other.  "Take all those feelings of isolation and abandonment…and multiply them a hundred fold.  Then you'll begin to have the barest hint of what it was like."

"I'm sorry that you had to go through that…but does that really justify sabotaging the Mallorian reactor?"

"That reactor was going to overload no matter what I did.  At least this way Voyager will still have a Captain."

"And the Mallorians will be helpless."

Her double stood up in frustration.  "I can't believe I was ever this pig-headed," she muttered, striding across the cave.

"I can't believe I would ever be this selfish."

"I ended up here because I put everyone else's safety before mine.  I saved B'Elanna's life."  She moved back over to join her.  "I'm doing this for you, Captain, not for me.  I've already been here five years.  I've already lost everything and everyone I ever cared about.  I did all this so that you wouldn't have to go through what I did."  She sighed and looked at the ground.  "Just think how many regrets you would have right now if you knew you were never going to see Chakotay or the crew again."  Her double lowered herself to her level again.  "But you will have a chance to make up for those regrets.  Those missed opportunities.  That is why I did this.  Not for me."

Captain Janeway remained silent, watching her double with interest.

"The irony is," she sighed heavily, "I didn't realize how much he meant to me until there were no more chances to tell him."  She reached over and rested her hand on her younger self's shoulder.  "I'm giving you that chance.  I need you to promise me something, Captain.  When this is over, tell Chakotay everything."

Her eyes widened.  "You know I can't promise that."

She looked down at the ground in frustration.  "You still don't understand," she said emotionally.  "You've wasted so many years.  It stops here, Kathryn."

"What happened to you doesn't give you the right to tell me --"

"I'm not trying to dictate to you," she snapped.  "I'm trying to make you realize that you have something special here, and you're bound and determined to ignore it."

"What I want is irrelevant."

"'Irrelevant?'" she snorted.  "You sound like Seven."

"I'm the Captain.  I don't have the luxury of a personal relationship, especially with my First Officer.  You should know that as well as I do."

The elder Janeway leaned closer.  "You know what I realized, being alone here?  That's just a convenient excuse I used as a safety net."

"It's not an excuse," she argued.  "It --"

"Don't bother.  I went through every reason that I know you're thinking of right now.  And none of them matter when you've lost everything.  If you had been kept away from him for five years, not knowing if he was all right, I doubt any of that would matter to you right now either."

"And if you still had a crew to think about," returned the Captain, "I doubt you would be able to dismiss those objections so easily."

*

"I think I've got something, Commander," said Lieutenant Ayala.

Chakotay moved forward to stand beside the security officer.  "What is it?"

"Human biosigns."  Ayala frowned and examined his tricorder in the dim light of the cave before turning to Chakotay with a puzzled frown.  "Two of them."

"Where?"

Ayala pointed to the fork in the cave ahead of them.  "About fifty meters in that direction."

There was a low rumble and they felt a tremor in the caves.

Torres to Chakotay.

"Go ahead."

The core's destabilizing.  I'd get out of there if I were you.

"We're closing in, B'Elanna.  We'll be out of here in a few minutes."

You don't have that long.  We've evacuated the core.  There's no way we can stop --

"B'Elanna?"

The ground shook underneath them, and rocks began to fall from the ceiling.

"She's blown the reactor!" yelled one of the Mallorians.  The Mallorian guards shoved the officers out of the way and ran towards the tunnel.

"Hey!" shouted Chakotay.  "What do you think you're doing?"

*

The heads of both Janeways snapped up.

"Do you hear that?"

The elder Janeway reached for the wall as the ground shook under them.  "The reactor must have blown," she said her eyes wide.

"If that's true, why are you still here?"

"Don't start with the temporal mechanics, Captain.  I --"

"There!" shouted a voice.

They turned around to see three Mallorian guards with their weapons raised.  The elder Janeway reached for the phaser she had stuck in her belt, but they fired before she even had a chance to get her hand around it.  She was hit in the shoulder and fell back against the wall with a thud.

The Captain took cover behind a rock as the Mallorians fired above her head.  She could hear more weapons fire, and when she stole a glance out of her hiding spot she saw the Mallorians were being fired upon from behind.  Chakotay and Lieutenant Ayala darted out of the passageway behind the Mallorians and take cover, firing on them, and she could see at least two more security officers still in the tunnel.

"Captain, are you all right?" yelled Chakotay over the phaser fire.

"I'm fine, Commander."

Chakotay motioned for Ayala to cover him and made a dash for where she was concealed.  The Mallorians opened fire, but they missed and struck the rock wall behind him.

The cave rumbled and shook again, louder this time.

"Kathryn!" yelled Chakotay, ducking behind a rock halfway between the exit and the Captain's position.  "Come on!"

She started to move towards him, but the cave rocked again, and the last thing she remembered was looking up to see the roof collapsing on her.

*

Coughing from the dust hanging in the air, Chakotay tried to sit up.  He winced at the stabbing pain that shot through his shoulder.  Glancing over, he saw that the shoulder of his uniform was torn and bloody.

He pushed himself into a sitting position and looked around him.  The dust from the cave-in was still settling, but he could see that most of the roof of the cave seemed to have come down.

He turned to where the Mallorians and his officers had been standing, but he saw nothing but a wall of rock.  The cave-in had completely collapsed the passageway, cutting him off from the others.  He hit his commbadge.  "Chakotay to Ayala."  There was no response.  "Chakotay to Voyager."

The only sound was the clinking of the last few rocks falling from the ceiling.

He heard a soft groan and his chest suddenly tightened as he remembered the last few seconds before the roof had come down.  "Captain?"

He looked beside him, but saw a pile of rock where he had last seen her.  "Kathryn!"

If the sudden chill in his blood wasn't evidence enough, he could see her hand protruding from under the rocks.  He ran over and began frantically digging at the pile, attempting to reach her.

"Get away from there!" yelled a voice.

A hand suddenly grabbed one of his arms and twisted it behind his back, and he was dragged backwards along the floor of the cave.  He struggled against his attacker, and managed to free his arm.  Sitting on the ground, he reached around and yanked their ankles, sending them to the floor with a thud.  He scrambled over the ground, pinning his opponent's arms down.  When they stopped struggling, he managed to get a look at his attacker's face for the first time.

He released her arms in shock.  "Kathryn?"

She sat up, equally stunned.  "Chakotay," she said quietly, her voice trembling.

"What…?"  After his initial shock passed, it dawned on him that the woman in front of him was not Kathryn Janeway.  Or at least not the Kathryn Janeway he knew.

"I…thought you were one of the Mallorians," she explained.

"Who are you?"

"I'll explain later.  Where's the Captain?"

The horrible feeling of dread returned with a vengeance.  "Over there."  He climbed to his feet and offered her a hand, helping her up.  She helped him clear away the debris and rocks until they saw her.

The color drained from Chakotay's face when he saw her fragile form laying motionless under the rock and the pool of blood slowly spreading from her head.  He reached over and rested his hand on the clammy skin of her face, tapping gently.  "Kathryn?"  His voice became more urgent.  "Kathryn?"

He fumbled with the tricorder in his belt.  When his trembling hands finally freed it from its holster, he opened it and scanned her.

"Is she going to be all right?" asked the Captain's double.

His mind was racing frantically and he had to blink a few times before he was able to register what was on the readouts.  "She's got major head trauma…internal hemorrhaging…and three fractured vertebrae."

"Is she going to be all right?" she repeated with more urgency.

He closed the tricorder and looked over his shoulder at her.  "Not without medical attention."

She sat down heavily on the ground and closed her eyes.  "I was trying to save her," she said quietly.  "Not get her killed."

"You kidnapped her?"

She smiled sadly.  "It's a long story…but your eyes aren't playing tricks on you, Chakotay."

Beside them, the Captain groaned softly and her eyes fluttered open.  Chakotay moved to her side, leaning over her.  "Kathryn?  Can you hear me?"

"What happened?" she whispered hoarsely.

"The reactor overload caused a cave-in."

Her eyes widened.  "Overload…"  She tried to sit up.  "B'Elanna?"

He held her down.  "Don't try to move."

"Is B'Elanna all right?"

He frowned in confusion.  "I don't know, the communicators aren't working.  But what makes you think she wouldn't be?"

She shook her head weakly.  "Long story."  Her eyelids slowly started to droop.

He grabbed her by the shoulder.  "Kathryn?  Stay with me!"

She mumbled something incoherent, and her head rolled to the side.

"Kathryn?  Kathryn, answer me!"  He touched her face, trying to get her to react, but she was unresponsive.

The elder Janeway lowered her head to her bent knees.  "The reactor overload caused a cave-in," she said quietly to herself.  She picked up a rock and hurled it across the cave.  It clattered to the floor.  "Why didn't I anticipate that?" she demanded angrily.

He looked around warily at the walls as a few more rocks fell from the roof.  "I don't think we're safe here," he said.  "These caves don't seem very stable."

"We can't move her with those kind of injuries."

He looked back at Kathryn's motionless form.  He had to stare at her for a long time before he could even determine that she was still breathing.  Her face was ashen, contrasting sharply with a trickle of bright red blood that was running down her face from a cut on her forehead.

"No," he admitted finally.  "I suppose we shouldn't."

"Besides, won't Voyager be looking for you?"

He nodded.  "I guess we'll just have to wait."  He turned and stared at her for a long few seconds.  "It seems we'll have time for that long story of yours."