Season 1 - Episode 4: Time and Again (part 2) [Interlude 1]
March 2371 (15 days in the Delta Quadrant)
Tuvok was waiting for them as the group made their way to the shuttlebay, Bell observed. The Vulcan had looked up as Gamma squad strode into the L-shaped room, coming to stand slightly straighter than usual and quirking an eyebrow in a way that the Maquis man found insufferable.
Lt. Dalal was at the head of their parade, and turned her back on Tuvok, raising an arm to indicate the Class Two shuttle, the Dawkins, sitting nearby. "Gamma, board up."
Bell hung back and waited for everyone else to step inside the craft, not eager to set foot inside the cramped vessel until he had to. He remembered what Jackson had said about these ships; "fast, maneuverable, but not built for people with spines." Six people were more than enough to make the space feel oppressive, and they were marching eight inside, not counting the pilot and engineer.
Then again, the Vulcan is going to have to shove himself in that Cochranealong with the engineering crew and the others over there, Bell reflected, noting that Chakotay and Torres were looking their way. It could be worse.
Tuvok said something to Chakotay and strode away from the shuttle carrying the engineering crew, calmly approaching the Lieutenant to speak with her. "I do not believe an armed escort will be necessary for this rescue mission."
The Indian woman smiled widely at the Tactical Officer, amusement clear on her face. "Oh I fully agree. However, I was ordered to have my people escort yours. I'm just following my orders. If you find fault with them, you'll have to take it up with my commander, Sir," she stated, perfectly formal and polite. Bell couldn't be sure, but it almost seemed like she didn't like Tuvok that much. It was definitely a point in her favor.
Tilting his head to the side, the Vulcan rebutted, "Be that as it may, it is my professional opinion that having so many people on the planet's surface would pose an unacceptable security risk." Bell wondered if the man had listened to Dalal, or was trying to order her without really ordering her, so she'd do what he wanted and likely get in trouble without Tuvok technically doing anything wrong. More Federation doubletalk bullshit, the Ensign thought darkly. He didn't trust any of the Voyager's crew, but the Lieutenant in charge of his squad hadn't done wrong by him yet. She just smiled at him, giving him a nod of assent, but not saying anything in reply.
"What's wrong, Tuvok?" came Shepard's increasingly familiar voice. The head of Security was casually stalking across the bay, adjusting the phaser strapped to the belt around his waist with one hand while the other was carrying a Tricorder. Bell observed the Commander approaching the Vulcan like he was an old friend, and for all the Maquis knew they might have been. "Is everyone ready to go?"
The stoic officer looked up at the chief of security and repeated, "It is my professional opinion, as head of Operations for Voyager, that having too many people on this mission would be dangerous, as well as counter-productive."
Shepard looked at the man, then glanced over at the Cochrane shuttlepod as Kim, Torres, Chakotay and for whatever reason, the Ocampa they'd picked up, were all getting onto their own craft. "Right," the Commander drawled dryly. "So you believe that having the entirety of the senior staff and command crew be on an away mission is acceptable, but having a single security team on site to provide support is unacceptable?"
Tuvok jerked an eyebrow, almost like a blink, before he glanced back at his shuttle for a moment and stared at his own group. He turned back to the Commander, expression fractionally tighter. "Your point is. . . noted," The Vulcan admitted, giving the other man a small nod. "For the record, I did object to having the First Officer join us, but he overruled me."
Dalal looked at the head of operations, like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, and innocently asked, "Just out of curiosity, sir, who is in charge of the ship while we are all down here?"
" Ayala," came the man's immediate reply. "Commander Chakotay placed him in charge while we are away."
Bell blinked back some surprise at that. Ayala had been Chakoty's right-hand man aboard the Val Jean, but since they all got stuck here the man had spent most of his time as a relief tactical officer on the bridge. Bell had actually forgotten the man existed from time to time as he was almost never seen off the bridge, and the command level wasn't part of Security's patrol routes.
"Provisional Lieutenant, Junior Grade Ayala," the Commander absently corrected, while glancing down at the padd in his hand.
Dalal glanced over at Shepard, with just a hint of a frown, and asked him, "Why do you do that?"
"What?"
"Why do you add the provisional to their ranks?" Dalal asked once more, her tone inquisitive but also slightly reprimanding.
Tuvok quirked his eyebrow once more and added, "I, too, have noticed you have this tendency. I previously believed you only did it to Commander Chakoty as a means to provoke an emotional response. However, I now observe that I was in error."
Commander Shepard smirked, letting out a small huff of amusement through his nose, and then admitted, "It did start out that way, Tuvok. Eventually, it just started to become a habit, I suppose." He shrugged carelessly, "It's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct."
"Interesting," the Vulcan commented. "I would have presumed it had originated as a negative subconscious desire directed at the Maquis, not as something so understated."
Dalal blinked at the Vulcan, "What?" Bell mentally echoed the question.
Shepard, on the other hand, just chuckled. "He thought I hated the Maquis and was singling them out," the Commander translated. "Which is just silly."
"Wait, you don't?" the Gamma leader shot back. Bell hadn't even noticed, though now that he looked at it, it was obvious.
"Hell no." the man shook his head and smirked. "If anything, I wanted them to win their border dispute. My biggest problem with the Maquis was how stupid they were being. If they had been smarter, they would have organized their resistance on one of the worlds the Federation offered to relocate them to, and then launched their attacks on the Cardassians from a position of strength. That would've given them a safe place to gather forces, organize supplies, and keep up the good fight while still having some form of Federation support. Instead they treated the neutral zone like a game of wack-a-mole and are slowly being eroded. Best projections have their fight ending, one way or the other, in the next three to four years. Not that we'll be there to see it. Pity, I had a few bets going."
Bell could feel his blood boiling at the cavalier way Shepard was talking about his people, but when he turned around to see how everyone else was reacting, he saw he was alone with the Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, and Commander. Everyone else had gotten comfortable in the shuttle as Harewood started the preflight sequence.
Seeing Tuvok, Dalal and Shepard walking towards their shuttles, Bell kicked himself into gear and stepped inside the Dawkin. The Commander gave him a knowing look, but didn't say anything about Bell's eavesdropping as they sat down and buckled in.
No one spoke in the shuttle as it lifted up and exited the ship, the flight smoothing out as it passed through the bay door into hard vacuum. There wasn't really any need to say anything at this point. The situation had been explained to everyone and there wasn't anything he could do about it. Engineering was been working on a solution to having two people lost inside a subspace fracture, and they needed to act fast as the fractures were all slowly closing in on themselves. It was Bell's job to look out, and if something dangerous fell out of an invisible tear in reality, he was supposed to stun the hell out it.
Instead everyone looked towards the front of the small craft at the rapidly approaching planet they had been orbiting. The explosion had blasted much of the surface to darkened ash, saturating the atmosphere. As the shuttle dropped lower and lower, it was like diving underwater, the light dimming more and more. From what he'd overheard an engineer saying, the planet was rapidly cooling and the ash clouds were plunging it into a global winter.
The techie had guessed that, within two years the entire planet would look like a giant snowball, and if everything down there wasn't already dead it would be soon.
It wasn't just darker, as the ship descended the turbulence crew more and more pronounced as well. These shuttles were rated for atmospheric flight, that much Bell knew, but he wasn't aware of how much punishment that could take and that little bit of ignorance exacerbated his nervousness. The ash shouldn't be able to clog anything important, and the pilots should be able to fly by instruments alone, but this wasn't normal ash.
Minutes later all the shaking suddenly abated as the shuttle cleared the clouds, the landscape a dim twilight despite it being almost mid-day. The Ensign could barely make out the other shuttle ahead of them, almost black with caked on ash, as well as the rapidly approaching ground. Every few seconds he was able to make out more and more details of the surrounding area, eventually making out that they were passing over farmlands and former woods by the shape of the regularly flat areas and the broken dead stumps that occasionally poked out of the ground.
Soon what should have been wilderness gave way to massive black-water rivers and the remains of clearly artificial structures attached to them that directed the flow into several directions, leading to a jagged forest of towering, warped steel in the distance.
Jackson's voice was sober as he whispered, "Mother of god. There would've been millions in that city alone."
Unconsciously Bell nodded his head, connecting the dots and imagining what it might have once looked like. Here and there were clearings that could have once been warehouses or office buildings, over there would have been a beautiful park with a small waterfall as the central fixture if that brackish pool had been a fountain, and he could easily imagine those ruins on the hills as apartment buildings.
Of course, it was the smaller buildings that had survived the chain reaction best. Markets and plazas that were closest to the ground survived mostly intact. Intact being relative of course, since all the windows and doors were obviously blown out, and the outer surface blackened by the flash fires, but the general structures still remained fairly intact.
That was how he noticed they were landing their shuttles in a nearby square, surrounded on two sides by long, low-profile buildings that might have been some kind of shopping center. There were triangular cuts in the concrete here or there, filled with scorched dirt, where plants of all types must have grown and beautified the area.
No sooner than the shuttle had sat down did Felix slip out of his harness and pop the hatch open. Everyone was assaulted with what Bell could only describe as burnt everything. The air was as dead and lifeless as the planet had looked, the cloying ash still in the air pummeling the crew's lungs like a carbon sledgehammer.
Bell unbuckled himself and reached a hand behind the man's head, giving it a firm smack, before berating his friend with, "Thanks for the warning."
Harewood finished powering down the shuttle, glancing out the window and huffing, "This place is a mess. Gonna be a bitch to clean."
He looked over at the black woman, giving her a critical eye. Bell's interactions with the girl had been limited to professional settings thus far, but he had quickly pegged her as the 'bad cop' to Lt. Dalal's 'good cop.' Starfleet through-and-through, she was a stickler for the rules and protocols in a way that didn't endear her to the Maquis members of the squad. She hadn't made them clean the showers with a micro-resonator, or anything else ridiculous, but Bell might've taken that over hearing her talk about the necessity for 'proper dress at all times and for all circumstances' for the tenth time.
She was somehow making friends with the other Maquis, regardless of her need to be a stickler for rules, and even Bell had to grudgingly say she was a good person at heart. She'd actually explained why they needed to be in uniform, even off duty, and it'd made some sense, even if Bell didn't like it. There was something of a friendly rivalry forming between Harewood and Lt. Wood on the firing range as well, and the two squads were having fun betting on who would have the best score at the end of the week.
It didn't hurt that Harewood seemed to hate Andrews as much as Bell did.
The woman turned back to the rest of the passengers and barked out, "Oh good, you all survived the ride down. Now get the hell out of the shuttle and make yourself useful. Tricorders out, set to magneton sweeps so you can spot those subspace fractures we were warned about."
Bell was still used to having a subordinate give the orders instead of the leader. In the Maquis, the captain gave the orders, and his second made sure they were ordered. Here it wasn't the Commander, or even Lieutenant Dalal giving the orders, but the third in command here, who they needed to follow as if Shepard himself said so. As everyone began to gather their gear and bustle towards the exit, Harewood shouted out once more, "And keep your damn eyes open! If you don't know what you are looking at, assume it's dangerous!"
Felix mumbled, "This whole damn planet is dangerous," looking out across the bleak landscape.
Bell gave his friend a shove and as soon as his feet hit the cracked pavement he reached for his tricorder as instructed. As one, the occupants of the shuttle began to move to the second shuttle only a few meters away to help unload the equipment.
The door was already open, of course, and Torres was standing there with her own tricorder out. Shepard walked up, a Tricorder of his own active, and from the look on his face it was obvious he didn't like what he was seeing. B'Elanna nodded to him and headed back inside the shuttle as the Commander slowly turned around, scanning the surrounding area. Bell also noticed that there was an armband around his bicep that hadn't been there before.
Shepard looked up at him, and noticed what he was looking at, so explained, "Anti-polaric field emitter. Should repel the fractures if they get within three meters of you."
He glanced inside the shuttle, and Bell looked in to see Torres shifting something that looked like a jumbo phaser on a tripod. Shepard called out, "How many of these armbands did your people get the chance to make?"
The half-Klingon looked up at him, the self-recrimination Bell had seen on her face before when she hadn't been able to do everything she wanted to, and answered, "We managed to make ten, so we can cover half of everyone here."
Nodding, Shepard turned back to the growing crowd around the shuttle and said, "Buddy system is in effect. For every person with an armband, another person without one needs to stay within three meters of them. I'll say it again, if you don't have one of these armbands, you stick to someone who does."
Bell watched the Commander turn back to the shuttle and help Torres and Tuvok remove the gear they would need. On the other side of them, Chakotay and Kes were walking away, heads bowed together and whispering something back and forth as they looked around.
Less than ten minutes later, the security officers had erected a cordon around the square. Bell and Jackson hadn't been lucky enough to get one of the armbands, but Harewood had and so the two of them were sticking close to the junior-lieutenant as instructed.
Kes seemed to be aimlessly wandering the area, an arm-banded Chakotay by her side, while Tuvok and Torres followed behind them carrying the gear. Bell could see that they were looking for something, but what that would be was still a mystery to the man.
The Ensign shivered as he felt the wind kick up. Checking his own tricorder, the temperature had fallen another two degrees and he could feel the static tingle of a storm on the horizon. If he had to guess, and if this was anything like that desert planet he'd done that run to, they had maybe an hour before it started. It would eventually get here, though and if it was anything like that sandstorm, it would be terrible.
Jackson turned to his friend and asked, "Any clue what they are waiting for?"
"Do I look like I know?" Bell snarked back.
Harewood looked up from her tricorder and chided, "You both need to pay attention in your briefings. That device they are carrying around can open a subspace fracture, but they can only use it once in any one area and will only work for about thirty seconds before it burns out. That means they have to pick carefully where to set up."
Jackson rolled his eyes at that. "I did pay attention, sir. What I wanted to know was how they were deciding where to set up."
"Maybe wherever that Kes girl is leading them." Harewood shrugged back in reply. "This stinks like a psi-op. The regs for those are so vague they're nearly useless."
There was another gust of cold wind, the wind biting at their exposed heads and hands, and Jackson gave a brief shake at the sensation. "I hope they find it soon. It is already negative-six out here, and it is only going to get worse the longer they take."
Bell smirked at his friend. "Glad the Commander got all of us these new uniforms?"
Jackson nodded enthusiastically. "Damn right I am. Wind bites right through the old ones."
Harewood smirked at the both of them, adding, "Engineering isn't. They are a little jealous, actually. Had several crewmen wondering where they could get some of these pants." Another point in the woman's favor was, once they were following regulations, she was a great source of gossip.
Bell grinned at the woman, unable to resist the opening, "You sure they weren't just trying to use a pickup line on you?"
Harewood narrowed her eyes at him, making her smile look less friendly and more dangerous. "Fraternization is against regulations. I can tell the difference, Ensign, see that you can too."
Holding up his hands in surrender, Bell glanced around the plaza. Of course, Starfleet would have regulations against something as natural as that. Not only did they control their officer's actions, they controlled their bedrooms as well. He tried to find something to talk about, to change the subject, but there wasn't that much to see. Everything was either broken or burned beyond recognition, but he needed something to do.
That was when he noticed Shepard was standing near the center of the plaza, next to what would have once been a stone bench under a tree. The Commander was staring at his tricorder, and looked like he was waiting for something to happen. Glancing at his own device, Bell could see that the path between he and the Commander was clear of fractures, the damaged space a fuzzy blur on the screen, but there was one or two further away that seemed to be drifting aimlessly.
Bell considered what to do, and was more than a little conflicted. This might be a good time to ask Shepard about what he was talking about before we left the ship, he thought.What does he know about the Maquis? How is he so sure we're gonna fail?'
"Hey, Harewood," the Ensign commented, trying to keep his tone casual, "I'm going to have a word with the Commander. He doesn't look very busy at the moment."
The junior lieutenant glanced at Bell, then over at where Shepard was standing, and then at her tricorder, before answering, "He tells you he's busy, you leave him alone, Ensign. That's his call, though, not mine. Path is clear, go for it."
With a brief nod of thanks, Bell turned and walked off towards the center of the square. The wind kicked up a bit of dust and ash in his path, some of it swirling and revealing the bits of torn subspace, but he blinked the grit from his eyes easily enough.
Bell watched as Shepard put away his tricorder and looked up at the darkening sky, his face seemed to be relaxed, or maybe considering. It looked like he was anticipating something. Maybe he was as concerned about the approaching weather as Bell was.
"Commander," the Ensign greeted.
Shepard snapped his head down to look at the other man, concern written across his features. "Bell? Aren't you supposed to be over with Harewood?"
"Yes, Sir," came the reply. "I just wanted to have a word with you while you didn't look too busy."
Shepard looked around the square. Bell followed his gaze, but he didn't see anything there. The Commander continued to stare intently at nothing, commenting, "Now might not be the best time."
"I don't see why not," Bell shrugged. "Nothing around here is a threat, the planet is dead, and all we have to do is stand around and wait for B'Elanna to set her equipment up."
Sighing, Shepard nodded, still looking around, and asked, "What do you want to discuss with me, Provisional Ensign Bell?"
Bell started to open his mouth to reply, but stopped as he glanced at Shepard's armband. Or rather, where it was supposed to be. Instead of asking his question about the Maquis, he cautiously stated, "Sir, it looks like your armband is missing."
Shepard glanced down at his arm, and then back at the Ensign without saying a word, the barest hint of a smile flickering at the edges of his lips. Bell blinked at the odd expression, and then nearly fell over as he was assaulted by noise and light. Between one moment and the next the surroundings had shifted from a world of death and ash, to vibrant and full of life. The thick grey clouds that looked like they could begin dropping snow at any moment were gone, replaced with a clear blue sky that held not a single cloud in it, the deep blue with just a tinge of evening orange touching it. The silence of the square was gone, and a cacophony of noise greeted him as he looked around and saw birds in the green trees and hundreds of men and women talking as they went about their business.
Nearby he could see two dozen kids playing a game that looked like tag around a small playground full of swings, a handful of adults watching over them. The broken and burnt pavement that covered the square had been replaced by red cobblestones and massive orb-shaped containers full of plants of all kinds of colors and sizes.
As a hand fell on his shoulder, and Bell spun around to see it was Shepard looking back at him. The larger man was openly grinning now, looking between him and the tricorder in his hand. "Congrats, Provisional Ensign."
"Sir?" Bell asked, having no idea what just happened.
"You just traveled a week backwards in time."
==/\==
Harewood had been glancing over at Bell to see if she was about to get a show. Shepard looked and talked like some of the hardasses she had met over the years, but she had also seen that the big guy was about as dangerous to the crew as a teddy bear over the past week. The crazy Talaxian was more of a danger than the Commander was, despite all the rumors being thrown around about him. He just played up the hardass act to get results, but all he was really interested in was making sure people were safe.
She could respect that.
So while she had been watching and hoping for a bit of a show, maybe a dressing down that every Ensign needed from time to time, the last thing she expected was to see the two men vanish where they stood.
Blinking a few times to make sure she was sure about what she saw, and seeing that Jackson had seen the same thing she did, Harewood slapped the comm badge on her chest and called out, "Harewood to Commander Shepard!"
When there was no response, she tried once more with the same result. After the third attempt to contact him, and with no response, the decision about what to do next was easy. Protocol was clear. "Harewood to Lieutenant Dalal."
"Dalal here." the voice of her squad leader spoke through her badge.
"Ma'am, I just watched Commander Shepard and Ensign Bell vanished into a subspace fracture."
There was a brief pause, before the squad leader's voice replied, cold as ice, the warmness gone in an instant, like the life from this planet. "What."
"They're gone, ma'am." Harewood repeated. "The two were talking in the middle of the square one second, and the next they were gone." She brought up the readings from her Tricorder. "Four of the fractures jumped, all of them to where the Commander was. They closed themselves an instant later. I don't know why."
There was another brief pause, followed by a brief tone that represented a team-wide message, "This is Tuvok. All personnel are to remain where they are and use their tricorders to confirm there are no fractures near you. Report any anomalies immediately."
"You get that Harewood?" Dalal's voice returned after the Tactical Officer had finished. Her tone had thawed slightly, but not by much.
Harewood nodded, mostly to herself, while looking at Jackson to make sure he had as well. "Yes, ma'am. Standing by."
As the line closed, Harewood and Jackson held their tricorders tightly as they carefully looked for any more fractures near them. It was Jackson that eventually broke the silence with a muffled, "I hope they're okay."
"Me too, Ensign," the woman muttered back. "Me too."
==/\==
"Hey, calm down!" Shepard barked quietly, shaking the Ensign slightly. A couple of the locals glanced over at them, but after looking at the pair's dirty clothes their attention slid off them and back to what they were doing.
Bell tried to follow that order, tried to breathe normally and get everything under control, but it wasn't really doing anything to stop the panic that was rushing through him like a shuttlecraft at full impulse. He's heard about what happened to people who time travelled. It was never good. He could unmake reality, or become his own grandfather, or unmake reality by becoming his own grandfather. Oh god, his mom had always said he looked like her father, what if-
"We've gone back in time," Bell whispered furiously, hoping that by saying it outloud so the universe could notice it'd made an error and drop them back on that cold, dirty, and most of all safe ashball. "We've gone back in time."
"Yes," Shepard confirmed in a soothing voice, "and now we need to get ourselves under control so we can plan a way out of this mess."
Bell tried once more to get under control, taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly, and after a few more minutes he felt like he was okay once more. Or at least as okay as he could be in this situation.
"Okay," Bell managed to slowly, and quietly, state, "so we fell through a fracture just like Janeway and Paris did. How do you know we only fell back a week?"
Shepard smirked as he spoke, "Tricorders are very handy things. It wasn't hard to figure out the when-we-are since I had been using it just before we arrived here."
"What?"
With an exasperated sigh, Shepard continued, "Don't worry about, unless the Maquis have courses on temporal travel via subspace incongruities, you wouldn't understand it anyways. Just trust me when I say we are six and a half days in the past. Now the question is, where are Janeway and Paris?"
Bell was getting a stronger grip on the situation, made easier now that he had a specific task to focus on. "Okay. Right. We know where we are, now we need to find the Captain."
"Assuming she's here." Shepard added absently, walking towards an alley and fiddling with his tricorder.
"Right," Bell nodded, following his superior officer. "Assuming she is...what? Why wouldn't she be here? We're here."
Shepard smiled patronizingly at the smaller man, which only made the Ensign angry. "What makes you think we fell into the same fracture as the others? There were dozens of them around the area, and those armbands everyone was wearing were pushing them around in 'unpredictable' ways. Janeway could have showed up around the same time as us, or she could have arrived a month ago. Or maybe she was unlucky enough to arrive just seconds before the explosion that will destroy this world."
The reminder that they were on a planet with a quickly approaching expiration date did nothing for Bell's nerves, but steeled his resolve to understand exactly what was happening. "Right. Speaking of those armbands, what happened to yours. If you had been wearing it this wouldn't have happened."
Shepard didn't even have the good grace to pretend to be disturbed. "Must have fallen off. Whups. I don't know what happened to it, and at this point it doesn't matter. We're here."
The Commander looked around with a critical eye, and commented, "On the one hand, it won't be difficult to just blend in with these people. They all look human, at least on the surface."
Bell looked around, noticing all the hundreds of people once more. He could see smiling faces of families going about their normal routines, merchants peddling their wares with loud voices. There were even a few people walking what Bell assumed was a pet but looked more like a miniature rhino covered in fur than any dog. He saw them, and knew they were all going to die.
Nodding, as he had nothing else he could do, the Ensign asked, "Well, what should we do?"
Shepard tapped his comm badge, "Shepard to Janeway. Paris."
Bell sighed in annoyance at the silence. It'd be too easy if they'd responded, and everything he'd read about time travel said it was never easy. "I assume that means the we got here before them?"
"That would be the best case scenario."
"What other scenario could there be?" Bell asked, with morbid curiosity.
Shepard huffed humorously. "Lots of things. Maybe they arrive so far back in time they are already dead and gone. They could have arrived not long ago and been arrested. There was no sign of these people having a post-warp civilization so if they were captured the Captain and Paris could both be in some government bunker being treated as lab rats. There's a reason why the Prime Directive was invented in the first place. There are a lot of things that could have happened to them."
As Bell started to think of all the horrible things that might've happened to the other two, things that might happen the him, the Commander added, "I'm going to assume we just arrived before them because we can't really do anything else."
Bell was so preoccupied with their conversation; he didn't notice the man approach them. He was dressed in a uniform, more formal than what everyone else was wearing, in a dark brown coloring. "Pardon, but I was curious about your dress. Where are you from?"
Shepard looked over and smiled at the man, giving him a nod. "Evening. Thank you for noticing the suit. Do you like it?"
The man, obviously some kind of security officer Bell guessed, based on the club at the man's waist nodded in reply. Maybe he was some kind of local guard, not necessarily law enforcement.
"It is certainly, distinctive." the guard said. "And dirty. Why are you wearing it?"
Shepard continued to smile, waving and arm at Bell and himself like he was showing them off. "Because I designed it. I'm a fashion designer, and thought I might garner some attention if I worse my creations. Mr. Bell here is helping me, giving some feedback on how it hangs and people's reactions. So far it has been fairly mixed. I've gotten a few orders, but one fashionless jerk disliked it so much he threw something at us. You wouldn't happen to be interested in purchasing your own?
The guard gave a small laugh, shook his head, and without another word walked off as if he hadn't just been talking to them.
"Well," the Commander grumped, "that was rude."
Bell eyed his superior officer, wondering if the man insane. "Fashion designer? Really?"
"I needed to come up with something. We do stand out." Shepard countered. "And I wasn't entirely against the idea of selling him my uniform for some good money."
"You sound like a Ferengi," Bell groused.
"And?" replied the larger man. "Unless you're on a Federation world, you need money. Or at least some form of trade goods. Hell, even the Federation understands bartering and trade. We rely on it, even if we like to pretend we don't. But we're not in the Federation right now, are we?"
"Now," Shepard stood up straight, and looked around. "We are going to be here for awhile, so we're going to need some basic things. Food, water, shelter, and information." He pulled out his tricorder and looked around, grabbing Bell's elbow as he led him into the alley fully. "Lets observe some of the local commerce for a while, get an understanding for their method of exchange, and then we can plan what to do for sleeping accommodations. With our tech, securing the funds needed won't be a problem."
Bell's brow furrowed. "But, wouldn't doing so be unfair? Wouldn't we be stealing?"
Commander Shepard laughed, nodding. "Tell you what, Bell. When we find Janeway, you can tell her yourself."