Author's note: Thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed. Yes, this is a Voyager fic, but here we have a cameo from DS9. And look, I got the Maquis thing right! :)
No matter what she did, it wouldn't go away.
Marla wanted the problem to go away. She wanted more than anything to be back on Voyager. On Voyager, she was not well liked. Most of the crew had despised the Equinox five. She'd been busted down to crewman on Voyager and had a half-Klingon boss who didn't trust her.
But on Voyager, she'd also had enough to eat, and she'd gotten back to the Alpha Quadrant, and she didn't have the problem of the enhanced warp device.
She'd been able to buy a little time from Rudy by claiming that the new warp core wasn't ready for the new enhancements. A jiggle or two of the dials and she was able to prove her case. Lying to Rudy made her feel awful, though. They'd been through so much together.
She had plenty of engineering work to do on the crippled ship, but there was always that empty space in front of the warp core. All she had to do was rebuild it. They could be out of this horrible wasteland. They could be home. Home. That word had been her watchword, her goal, for so many years. All that was keeping her – all that was keeping the entire crew – from home was her own feeling that getting home this way was wrong.
It made her feel guilty. Who was she to keep everyone from home just because of her own morals? No one else on the ship felt that way. Knowing that they'd sacrificed to keep her alive while she lay unconscious in sickbay made it worse. After all that, knowing they'd struggled to keep her alive, not rebuilding the device seemed ungrateful, the act of a selfish little girl.
All that stood between her and creating it was that her own desire not to. She didn't want to kill any more aliens. She didn't want to have to look at the thing every day and remember what it was for. She'd told Commander Chakotay that she had tried not to think about how it would be used, but she couldn't forget it either.
It wouldn't look like much; a kettle sticking into the plasma manifolds. But she had known, and she would know again. She didn't want to do that if she could help it.
All the same, she didn't know how much longer she would be able to hold out. Would Rudy throw her off the ship? Burke would, in a heartbeat. Being in the Delta Quadrant had changed Burke, or perhaps only brought out what had already been lurking under the surface. Some of it was simply her own waning strength; being constantly cold and hungry and tired was a hard fate to bear, and eventually you'd turn down any path to get away from it.
She'd had the nightmare again last night. This time, she'd heard Janeway's voice, cold and cruel. You betrayed my ship. This is the price I demand of traitors. Just think of how Ransom's going to run his ship without an engineer. It didn't sound like the captain she had known. The proof was right in front of her eyes, though, She wasn't on Voyager. This was Equinox. This was reality.
She was running another diagnostic on the new warp core, and it was offering her the results she didn't want to see. Everything was fine, all the gauges in the green. Equinox would be able to cruise along at its maximum warp speed just fine. There was no reason she couldn't start on the enhanced warp drive.
There was, but Rudy and Max would never understand. They lived in the same world she had lived; one in which suffering and despair had long since extinguished higher morals. It's wrong was not an answer they would accept, but it was the only answer she had.
Her reverie was interrupted by a sound – a long, keening whine that she knew all too well. Marla stood up from her chair and looked around wildly. Where was the damn thing? Her hand dropped automatically to her waist, and found no phaser there. Her heart began to pound.
There, on the other side of Engineering. She dove for the panel and recovered the phaser, automatically turning it on and groping for the firing stud. Her arm swept in front of her, back and forth, seeking her target. Rudy had told her that the auto-initiating security grid was online, but what if it didn't work? They'd already lost so many crewmen to those horrible creatures.
A dimensional fissure opened two meters in front of Marla Gilmore. From it, a howling alien life form dove forth, seeking to grasp her and kill her with its touch. Her phaser hand automatically came up and fired.
The beam hit the wall next to the creature. Marla's heart leaped and she tasted copper on her tongue. Her eyes were wide, staring at the alien. Her hand shook, and she had to try and get a bead on it before it killed her.
The grid surrounded the alien with a forcefield, functioning with typical Borg efficiency.. She flattened herself against the wall anyway, covering it with a shaking phaser. The alien caromed around its prison for a few moments; easily the longest moments of her life. After what seemed like an eternity, it collapsed to the ground.
The thunder of heels made her turn, and she almost shot her own first officer dead. Max Burke stood on the doorway, a phaser rifle in his hands, an expression of mixed concern and annoyance on his face.
"You all right, Marla?" he asked.
She checked herself over and nodded slowly. Her knees were trembling. She didn't want him here. There was something creepy about the first officer of the Equinox. Every time he smiled, she'd always gotten the idea he was faking it. The only times he truly seemed happy was when he was doing his unspeakable work in the lab.
"Good," he said coolly. "We saw he'd gotten in here up on the bridge. Rudy sent me down here to make sure you were okay."
Marla nodded again, still trembling and feeling like a guitar string keyed up three octaves too high, and found her voice.
"I—I'm fine, Max. It just scared me, is all."
He nodded, looked around the warp core, and put his phaser rifle down. His boots rang on the deck as he stalked towards her and put the phaser rifle on her console. She shrank back from him and checked herself, knowing she shouldn't.
"You sure you're okay?" The expression of concern on his face was a careful sham. Good, but not good enough.
"Yes. I'm fine. It just scared me. The...the thing got it."
"The auto-initiating grid we got off the Borg drone." His voice was flat.
"Yeah. That."
He smiled again, the smile clearly not touching his eyes. "Good. I'm glad you're all right. But now, Marla...do you get it?"
Marla sat down hard on her chair before she collapsed. Aliens and Burke were not a combination to her liking. She eyed him carefully, trying not to let her distrust show.
"Get what?"
"We're in a war, Marla. We didn't mean to start it, but we did, and either we kill them or they kill us." His dark eyes were intense. "Rudy wants that enhanced warp up and running. Get us a parts list."
"I, uhh, I've been working on it, we need to shake down the warp core--,"
He was unmoved. "Just tell us the damn parts you need, Marla, then we can get out of this hellhole." His voice sounded annoyed, and Marla thought for a moment that it was one of the few real emotions he still had anymore. He reached down and picked up the dead alien by one flipper. "This guy didn't come to give you a kiss, you know." He flapped the alien corpse at her obscenely. Its mouth lolled open, exposing needle teeth. Her stomach rolled.
"Okay," she whimpered. "I---I'll get him a list. I'll get you a list. Please, Max, I--,"
"You've got to get on the stick," he said emotionlessly. "In case you didn't realize it, Marla, Voyager is out there somewhere. We can deal with these guys, but we can't build an anti-Voyager grid. And you never know if that grid is going to hold or not. So I'll ask you again, Marla. Do you get it?"
She felt a lump growing in her throat and simply nodded. Couldn't he see? Couldn't he leave her alone?
"Rudy says you've been dragging your feet on rebuilding the enhanced warp," he continued mercilessly. The contempt in his voice was worse than a whip. "Quit screwing around, Marla. You were in a coma for three months. We took care of you. Not Voyager. We did. And you of all people should know how little we have on this ship. We fed you. We changed your catheter. We bathed you just like a baby. You owe us."
The idea of Max Burke leering down at her comatose body, sponge in hand, suddenly made her nauseated.
She was weak and exhausted and scared. The idea of all this being over, not to mention Burke leaving her alone, was tempting as a siren's call. Just to be warm and safe again, with a replicator that actually gave you food when you asked for it instead of flatly announcing 'replicator rations exhausted'. That was all she wanted. Was that so wrong?
"O-okay," she stuttered. "I'll get a list."
"Good. I want it by the time you finish up."
He turned on his heel and strode back up to the lab, swinging the dead alien by its tail as he went.. His boots echoed in the Jeffries tube as he went to perform his unspeakable task. She couldn't concentrate on anything; she was shaking and shuddering and felt like she might throw up. Her hands were jittering and she tasted sour acid in her throat.
Before she knew it, a PADD – one that still worked, no less, was in her hand, and she was beginning to scrawl out the parts she needed to build that hated, damned device.
I can't. I can't do this. This is how it starts.
Another voice in her head spoke up: It's just a list. Give them the list, it's just parts. Rudy still has to get everything. It'll buy me some time, that's all. It's not like they don't have the schematic already.
No. Don't. Max was just yelling at me because Max does that; it's how he gets his way. I can't do this. Doing it the first time cost me so much. No one will ever respect me again because of that. I can't do it again. I can't. I can't.
But all those people on Voyager weren't your friends. They tried to kill you and they'll do it again. This is Equinox, and as much as I'd like to be on Voyager, I'm not. And how can I possibly tell these people who did stick by me and did keep me alive that they're not going to get home just because of my principles? Who the hell am I to make that kind of decision for them?
The worst thing about Equinox hadn't been the violence, or the starvation, or the workload that no human being could've handled. The worst thing about Equinox was despair. Starfleet crews had been hungry, overworked, and attacked before. It was far worse to know that no one who knew you or cared about you knew where you were or what you were suffering. With an uncrossable gulf of light-years between you and home, you suffered in complete isolation. And none of it meant anything. There wasn't any grand purpose to it; you weren't saving Starfleet or some planet full of colonists or anything. It was just meaningless suffering and pain.
Just a list, Marla Gilmore thought dazedly. Just a list, it's just a list, it's just a list, just parts, he doesn't have them yet, he might not be able to get them, they might not be good enough, it's just a damn list, who cares, I still have time, I can convince them, I just have to give him a list, both my captain and first officer ordered me to do it, didn't they?
She was faintly glad it was Rudy who came down to Engineering a few hours later and not Burke. Wordlessly she handed him the PADD. He glanced down at it, smiled, and nodded.
"Thank you, Marla," he said. "I know. It's not easy. I'll work on getting these parts for you." A fatherly pat on her shoulder was her reward for having started that slow descent down the slippery slope.
She nodded, her throat clamped firmly shut, and managed a 'yes, sir' from somewhere.
She didn't cry. She didn't speak either; not in the sad, broken place that was Equinox's mess hall, not on her usual post-shift visit to the bridge, not in the corridors, and not in the cold darkness of her quarters. Marla Gilmore sat on her battered bunk, staring at nothing, wondering if she had just begun just the slow process of forfeiting her soul.
Dr. Julian Bashir was exhausted.
Things had been going normally for a while. A few fights on the Promenade, nothing he couldn't patch up. The O'Briens were visiting from Earth, and Molly O'Brien had an earache. That was nothing he couldn't handle either, even though pediatrics wasn't his specialty.
Then...well, then, hell had broken loose.
Romulans were still allowed to dock at DS9, and so there were a detachment of perhaps twenty Romulan soldiers on the station while their ship was being reprovisioned. Completely out of the blue, two of them
That was the only word for it. According to their fellows, they had started to complain of weakness and some muscle pain while at Quark's. Less than half an hour later, they'd collapsed and been brought to sickbay.
Once there, he'd done everything he could for them. Yet the symptoms worsened very quickly. They'd developed diarrhea and rashes. They'd begun vomiting. Their temperatures had spiked. Then their kidneys and livers had begun to shut down. Finally, internal and external bleeding had developed. After only a few days in his sickbay, they'd died.
He'd done everything he could. He knew that. Yet he hadn't been able to change the course of the disease one iota. He'd been reduced to simply making them comfortable while they died. That bothered him intently. He was a doctor. He was supposed to save lives . But he had failed here.
The disease was like nothing he'd ever seen. The closest he could find to it was an old Earth disease known as 'Ebola'. But Ebola, like most diseases, had been cured a few centuries ago. And there was no way Romulans could catch a disease that had existed on Earth. The physiologies were simply far too different.
To make matters worse, a visiting Vulcan scholar had come to his sickbay a day later, suffering identical symptoms. She, too, had died. He hadn't been able to do anything for her either.
Dr. Bashir was frightened as well as disappointed. He couldn't find any tie between the Vulcan and the Romulans. It was true that the Romulan Empire was being less than forthcoming with their whereabouts before arriving at the station, but even so, he couldn't find a match. Any doctor would have an extremely tough time putting the pieces together unless he was very bright and had all of the pieces of the puzzle when the patient first came in.
He stared at the three bodies in his sickbay, on gurneys pushed off to the side now. Sheets covered them and gave them anonymity in death. A forcefield surrounded them, so that whatever they had couldn't infect others.
He wiped his forehead and took a moment to stare at the sweat of his brow. His combadge skittered as he tapped it.
"Bashir to Nerys," he said tiredly.
A moment later, Deep Space Nine's commander answered him. "Go ahead."
"We have a serious problem. I'll need to inform Starfleet Medical and the Romulan ambassador. For now, we need to evacuate all Romulans and Vulcans from Deep Space Nine."
Tom Paris found it hard to concentrate. The procedure was going fine; no problems there. Noah Lessing was under sedation but awake, and the doctor was careful but calm as he piloted a stimulator around the black man's bald head. As acerbic as the doctor could be off duty, he really did care about his patients.
He found it hard to concentrate because he would ponder Noah Lessing's circumstances, and they were uncomfortably like his own. He hadn't ever killed aliens to make warp fuel out of them, but he'd been in the Maquis. He'd never done anything himself that was anything worse than fighting and drinking, but Michael Eddington had used biogenic weapons against a Cardassian colony planet.
At one time he would have simply shrugged it off as a casualty of war. But he was older now. An entire planet poisoned in the name of a cause that he, Tom Paris, had supported. He didn't like the thought of that.
Voyager had been his second chance in life, and he'd made the most of it. He'd left on Voyager as a prisoner; he'd returned a Starfleet lieutenant with a wife and daughter. The Equinox five had borne the brunt of their captain's crimes. Their names had been in the news. He knew that, too. It hadn't been that long ago that the holonews headlines had read Decorated Admiral's Son captured in Maquis raid.
What if he had never gotten that second chance? Would he have ended up like Noah Lessing? By now he'd have been off parole, but getting off parole was only part of it; you never really got your good name back. He kept seeing himself trying to get a job, or a room. Oh, you're Tom Paris? The Admiral's kid who joined the Maquis? Can't use you. Sorry.
Would Noah Lessing ever get a second chance? Maybe he'd done some terrible things in the Delta Quadrant, but he had done them under circumstance that were pretty damned dire. And the Equinox crew had, after all, been acting under Captain Ransom's orders. It wasn't easy to defy your captain, and if you did you usually paid a price for it. He knew that all too well.
Would Marla Gilmore? That's what all this was about. B'Elanna had taken a while to warm to her subordinate. She held the Equinox crew responsible for the deaths of a few of her engineers, and Gilmore had been the only one under her. It hadn't been until the battle of Unimatrix Zero that she'd eased off, after Gilmore had busted her butt along with everyone else to get the ship functional again. She'd come up with a few shortcuts which sidestepped safety regs, but got warp back online faster. Safety regs didn't mean much if you died following them. He knew Harry had dated Gilmore a few times, but wasn't sure if anything had come of it.
And what did the captain have in mind, anyway? B'Elanna still had to answer for her Maquis days, like the rest of the Maquis except for him. He didn't like the idea of Marla Gilmore stuck somewhere, but he didn't like the idea of his wife going to prison for violating her release conditions either. But for right now, all he had to do was question Noah Lessing.
"Mr. Paris." The EMH sounded annoyed as it interrupted his reverie.
"Sorry," Tom covered. "Just thinking." He cleared his throat. "Okay, Noah. I want you to go back to the bar in San Francisco.
"Okay," Noah Lessing breathed. Those eyes that had troubled Captain Janeway so were hazy and thoughtful.
"Somebody bought you a drink there. Tell me about him."
"He was...white guy, like you. Pale skin. Tall as me, about. Really bright blue eyes," Noah mumbled.
"What did he say?" Tom pressed.
"He....bought me a drink. Asked me how I was. I told him...lousy. Didn't get into it. But he...," Noah twisted on the biobed and let out a sharp snort. "He knew my name. I didn't...didn't remember telling him. But I was drunk."
"He bought you a drink. What happened then?"
Noah's brow furrowed. "Can't...can't remember," he said thickly.
The doctor gave Tom a concerned glance and turned up the power on his device. "Increasing to thirty microjoules," he said.
"Try and remember again, Noah," Tom said.
Lessing jerked. "He got me another drink...then...," he snorted thickly. "then everything goes dark...,"
I knew it, Paris thought. "What happens when you wake up, Noah? Where are you?"
"This room...nothing in it but a chair. It's dark and I can't see anything. Totally dark...pitch black. My hands...my hands are behind my back. There's this thing on my head...it hurts. There are two voices...they ask me questions...it goes on and on. For hours. They turn on the device sometimes and it hurts. Really bad, like something's drilling in my head. Then they ask me...about Ransom and Burke...what they were like. I don't understand, Ransom and Burke are dead. Who would care? But they keep asking and keep asking...what are they like, how do they behave, stuff like that. Then one of them says...'We've got enough to construct psych profiles on, Mr. Benning,' and I feel...a hypo on my neck...then everything goes black. Then I'm in the alley behind the bar, stinking like booze...so I picked myself up, called my folks and booked passage home."
The doctor peered at the readout of his instrument. "I don't think we'll be able to get more out of him," he said. "Whatever combination of drugs and mind scanning equipment they used severely damaged his memories of the encounter. Pressing further could endanger his health."
Tom nodded. "Well," he said, "we've got something good. Somebody did scan his brain. But for what?"
"You're not cleared for that information," a new voice said.
Tom looked up. In the doorway stood a man with fierce blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair. He gave Tom a friendly grin, not seeming to notice the incongruity of the smile with the phaser he held trained on him.
"Believe me," Benning said calmly, "I apologize for having to do this to a Federation hero. But I'm afraid Mr. Lessing knows too much, and so do you."
Automatically, Paris's hand went to his combadge. "Security to sickbay! Intruder alert!" He dove over the biobed. Lessing had come here; the least Tom could do was get him some cover. The doctor strode over, intending to fight the man or hold him off until security got there. Paris pulled the sedated man down to the floor, trying to crouch over him and look for a weapon at the same time. The closest thing he could recognize was a laser scalpel. It would have to do.
Pulse pounding, Tom dodged around the biobed and looked. He could hear the doctor struggling with the other man. He flicked the laser scalpel on and crouched, trying to see who was winning. Then the phaser beam struck him. He had a moment in which the world tumbled away from him, the scalpel falling from his nerveless fingers and scorching the carpet, and then everything turned black.