Disclaimer: Paramount owns the universe and all the regular characters, I just play here.

5. An evening at the Pass.

Kim and Leena came back to the Pass as the stores had closed. Chakotay was pleased to see they had done well.

After they ate, they started to go over the tricorder readings. Chakotay pointed out how every transporter test had resulted in the opening of a small rip in time. Leena studied the readings closely.

"There," she said. "The rips in time do not appear to get any larger, but they do go further backwards in time as the distance in space increases. The testing was done at short distances and low levels of power, so the time shift was always short. But if we had enough power, and transported far enough, this could get us back."

Chakotay nodded. He could notice a similar pattern. Still, he kept re-checking all of Leena's work. For some time, she tried not to notice, and worked on, bend over her tricorder. Eventually she sat back.

"Okay, what is the problem?" she asked Chakotay.

He'd known this was coming, but he feigned ignorance and tried to wave it off. "Nothing."

For a long moment Leena considered to let is rest, but she knew they had to better work this one out now.

"Permission to speak freely?" she asked.

Chakotay considered saying 'no', but he knew he couldn't put it off forever. *Might as well get this over with*

"Granted."

Leena took a deep breath. "Commander, you've checked on my every step. You have avoided me on Voyager, you never say a word you don't have to. A lot of people reacted that way when I came on board, but you are the only one who still does. What is your problem with me?"

"Why didn't you ask someone?" Chakotay wanted to know.

"I did. Several times." Leena said. "They said it was your story to tell."

*I guess it is* Chakotay thought. He sighed.

"Okay then." He closed his tricorder and put it down.

"You have heard about Seska, giving the replicator to the Kazon."

Leena nodded.

"She was part of my Maquis crew. She joined the Maquis a full six months before the mission that ended here in the Delta Quadrant. She passed as a Bajoran at the time, claiming experience from the Kohn-Ma. She came on my team, and was quick to impress me with what she knew about the Cardassian defenses. No wonder she knew all these things -she fed me just enough information to gain my interest. Soon, she started to drop by in off hours. We spent several months together, working and getting to know each other on a personal level. Or, at least I thought I got to know her."

Leena listened closely. She had known it had to be something personal, from the way the other crew members had refused to tell her about it. Still, this was the first time she heard him talk about it.

"A few weeks before that last mission, things got pretty hectic in the Demilitarized Zone. As we had the ship to run, I decided we couldn't go on having a relationship and word together ship at the same time. Seska said she agreed, but she kept popping up, 'coincidentally' running into me everywhere."

Chakotay stared into the fire. He was back in the Alpha Quadrant again, planning Maquis missions while Seska interrupted with little messages, or with what had appeared to be genuine interest and concern for him. *Yeah, she was interested, alright*

"We went on a mission, should've been simple enough. We were chased into the Badlands by a Cardassian warship. Next thing we knew, we where here in the Delta Quadrant. The Maquis vessel was destroyed, the Array blown up to keep the Kazon from controlling it, and we joined the Voyager crew." Chakotay skipped over the details as Leena knew most of this already.

"I did not see much of Seska for several weeks, as we were all very busy. We had repairs to make, supplies were much lower than they are now, we were converting some area's of the ship for uses they'd never been intended for."

"One morning we had beamed down to a planet to collect food and supplies when a Kazon ship arrived in the sector. The Captain ordered a beam-up, and Seska was missing. I ordered the others to return to Voyager, while I stayed behind to look for her. I found her in a cave where she claimed to be collecting mushrooms. She must've been meeting with the Kazon right there."

"The Kazon saw us and fired. I was hit -now I know it wasn't the poor shooting of the Kazon which kept me alive. They just wanted to put on a good show." Chakotay hesitated. *No reason to go into details of the soup-fiasco*

"To make a long story short, the next day we found a disabled Kazon vessel. Turned out they'd tried to install one of Voyager's food replicators, using insufficient shielding. We knew someone on board Voyager had given it to them. As Seska tried to cover her tracks, she was injured. The Doctor discovered she wasn't really a Bajoran."

Chakotay felt his anger rise. This was the first time he'd really spoken about any of this. "She tried to deny she was a Cardassian, claiming she'd had a Cardassian bone marrow transplant as a child. When the Doctor informed her that did not explain all of the Cardassian traces in her blood, she admitted to her heritage, but she denied being the one who had given the replicator to the Kazon." He paused.

"With Tuvok, I set a trap for her, telling her we did not know where the replicator had been taken from." He paused again.

"Even though I now knew she was a Cardassian, I still didn't want to believe she had betrayed us. She kept up pretence as long as she could, but when she fell for the trap and knew she'd been found out, she finally showed her real face. She called the Captain a fool, and me a fool for following her. 'If this were a Cardassian ship, we would be home by now.'" Chakotay quoted.

Leena grimaced. She'd been on a Galor class warship when she had been pulled to the Delta Quadrant, and she knew exactly how untrue that statement was.

"She beamed out of sickbay," Chakotay continued, "With a special override command she had installed. We were in no position to pursue."

*If only that had been the last we had seen of her* he thought.

As he remained silent, Leena softly said. "But that wasn't all of it."

Chakotay slowly shook his head. "No, it wasn't."

He took a deep breath. "We knew she was with the Kazon. We heard her name mentioned, or references to her. But we didn't see her again for some time. Not long before you came aboard, we ran into her again."

"We were met by the Kazon. Seska used her knowledge of Voyager to board the ship and steal more equipment. I went after her, trying to stop her." Chakotay's voice was hard. "It did not work out the way I intended. Seska got her hands on me, instead."

Chakotay clenched his fists. His voice was more harsh than at any other time. "As I was on the Kazon ship, Seska took some of my DNA, and used it to impregnate herself."

Chakotay stopped, and stared in the fire. Nobody spoke. Leena had listened to him in utter silence. The first part of his story struck her as typical Obsidian Order tactics. Despicable, if you asked her, but typical. But this?

After a long silence, Chakotay looked at her.

"Now you know."

Leena honestly didn't know what to say. She'd known something had been going on, but this was more than she'd been able to imagine.

"I'm sorry," she said, knowing it sounded lame. "This is extreme, even for the Order."

"You don't seem to like the Obsidian Order much," Chakotay observed.

Leena shook her head. "Not many people do. Oh, you would never hear me say that back in the Alpha Quadrant. But the Obsidian Order has some pretty fanatic members. Especially the undercover department. Those people have to be extremists -to be surgically altered like that. I don't know the details, no one outside the Order does, but they even mess with the mind sometimes. Seska must've been a fanatic to get into that in the first place. Obviously, she's a fanatic in other things, too."

"You can say that again," Chakotay said. "You know, I don't even know her real name. I had a relationship with the woman, and I don't even know who she was."

It wasn't really a question, but Leena answered it anyway.

"I couldn't find out even on Cardassia. Tain knows; two, three others. I'm sorry."

Chakotay looked at the Cardassian sitting across from him. He did feel better now he'd finally told it all to someone. Strange, the Captain had invited him to tell it several times, and he never could. Here, he'd told it to the last person he'd wanted to tell it to this morning. Why had he been able to tell Leena what he couldn't tell Janeway? He shook his head.

"No, I am sorry. I have not treated you fairly. It's just...," he took another breath, "I keep seeing her when I look at you."

"It is hard to trust again once your trust has been broken."

Kim jumped. Nobody had noticed the slight woman sitting down behind the Ensign. She was the same woman who'd remarked they were from the past, the previous day. Chakotay stared at her, and she studied him closely.

"It isn't that you can't trust Leena. You're afraid to love again. To get hurt again," she stated. And, at his questioning look, she added, "Oh, I don't know who. Someone back where you came from."

She looked at Chakotay intensely. "Yes. Definitely someone on Voyager, where ever that is."

*How much had she heard?* They had definitely told these people a great deal more than they had intended, but no one had noticed the quiet woman as she sat down.

Chakotay's first reaction was to deny her observation. But as he thought about it, he realised she was right. He just hadn't admitted it to himself, before. That was why he had not been able to talk to Janeway about Seska. He had tried to keep his distance, afraid of what might happen. *Afraid to get hurt again.*

So instead he asked, "How do you know?"

But the woman had stopped talking and was staring off as if she didn't pay any attention at all to what was going on.

Set and Elah came over to the fire. Set had just heard the last question.

"En passes herself off as a medium, a fortune teller. That's how she earns her money. She doesn't have any real supernatural powers, of course, but she observes people, and she listens more closely than anyone I know. She often notices things other people do not." And, taking in the scene and coming to a conclusion of his own, he added, "Sometimes she even notices things people did not know about themselves."