The Contractor: Chapter 3
Paris wasn't drunk when he got to the port, but his aching head and stomach were enough to tell him that he hadn't stopped drinking soon enough the night before. He usually stopped drinking around the time he started plotting the flight plan, but this trip was different.
With the exception of his five days with Mike the Maquis, this would be the first time he had flown other people since Caldik Prime.
The Val Jean was nothing exciting, at least from the docking port. It looked like its frame was based on a runabout, but an old one, and various people over various years had gotten creative from there. He wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a single original component left.
Chakotay had told him to meet him on the bridge. He didn't explain where the bridge was, but Paris had been on enough ships to know that, even though there was no reason for it, the bridge was always up and fore, and so he headed in that direction.
Surprise, surprise. He was right. It was up an actual ladder, but it was the top deck and as far forward as the ship went.
He found the Maquis captain in a chair that he supposed could be the captain's chair, but could probably also be the helm, or maybe tactical, or maybe all three. "You rang?" he said sarcastically to announce his presence, and it was only after the words were out of his mouth that he registered the other people on the bridge: Mike the Maquis; a woman who could be Klingon but was probably half or less, judging by her ridges; a skinny human man with dark hair; and a Bajoran woman already with a sneer on her face.
"Right on time," Chakotay said, ignoring Paris' sarcasm. He gestured around him. "Ayala, Bendera, Torres, Seska, this is Tom. He'll be flying you to Torros. He's been working for me for several months. He checks out." Mike—Paris had no idea which surname belonged to the big and silent man—gave a slight nod as if confirming that piece of information, and Paris knew without a doubt what Mike had been doing on his shuttle a few weeks before, just as he knew why he had had contracts with other Maquis captains. Chakotay was seeking independent verification, not of his credentials, but his loyalty. He supposed there was probably a spy issue out there, probably going both ways between Starfleet and the Maquis. The Cardassians would probably try to get in on that as well, but it was harder to hide a Cardassian in a Maquis crew than yet another random human or Bajoran. "You have a flight plan, Tom?"
Paris didn't know if there was a reason why Chakotay was purposefully avoiding his surname, especially given that he didn't seem to mind using them for his own crew, but he went along with it anyway. "Yeah," he said. He glanced at the PADD in his hands, and then around the bridge. The viewscreen was currently displaying the docking port, and he wasn't sure if it was a viewscreen at all or just a viewport. "Uh, where are the display controls?"
The part-Klingon woman huffed impatiently in her seat—tactical? Engineering? Helm?—and pressed a few controls, and Paris was relieved to see that the viewscreen was actually a viewscreen and not just a viewport. "Right," he murmured, then transferred the flight plan from his PADD to the screen. "We'll go through the Badlands and around—"
"That's going to add at least two days to our route," the part-Klingon woman interrupted, then looked over at Chakotay when she said, "If we just go directly—"
"Listen, uh…" Paris trailed off when he realized he didn't know her name.
"B'Elanna," she huffed out, her face getting red. "Torres."
"Listen, Torres," he resumed. "I've been flying these routes for almost eight months, and if we go direct," he tapped a few controls on his PADD, and previously hidden tactical points appeared on the route, "we're going to run right into this Cardassian patrol here, or maybe these pirates here. I know where people tend to hang out around here. I'd rather add two days than add some time in Cardassian prison."
Her face reddened further. She opened her mouth to say something, but Chakotay's raised hand stopped her. Maybe the captain hadn't been exaggerating when he said how well-trained they were. "He's the pilot," Chakotay said simply. He glanced over at Mike. "Ayala, you're in charge. Make sure someone shows Paris where the berth is at some point. Bendera, you're with me."
"Aww, I always miss the good ones," the skinny man said. "See y'all on Torros in a few weeks."
After Chakotay and Bendera took off, Mike—Ayala—took a seat in the left station—tactical? Engineering?—and Torres and the Bajoran—he guessed that would be Seska, by process of elimination—disappeared down the ladder off the bridge to parts unknown. "Any secrets to flying this thing?" Paris asked as he activated the controls and began to familiarize himself during a pre-flight.
"It's old," Ayala said. "You get used to it."
Paris chuckled at the succinct reply; about what he expected. "Right," he said. The frame of the ship may have been an old runabout, but the navigational array appeared to have been salvaged from something Starfleet had put to pasture at least two decades before, and he'd be surprised if the engines were younger than he was. But Chakotay had been flying around in it with his crew of—Paris realized that he had no idea how many people were on board with him at the moment.
Great.
About an hour after Chakotay and Bendera took off, they were cleared by both engineering and the port to depart, and they were off. It was a little shaky at first, but Ayala was right when he predicted that Paris would get used to it.
After a few hours, Paris began to suspect that they didn't have regular shifts on the Val Jean. Ayala had gone and someone had taken his place without introducing herself, and a couple of hours later, a man ascended the ladder and took a seat at the engineering—or was it ops?—station, also without saying anything to Paris. "So," he finally said, the first words he had spoken since they left orbit. "How do shifts work around here?"
"Need a break?" the woman at tactical asked. He barely bit back the impulse to say, well, I wasn't planning on staying awake for the fourteen-day trip to Torros, but she had seemed nice enough—at least by comparison—so he refrained.
"I've got the route on autopilot, but I'm not sure about your protocols for leaving the conn unmanned," he explained. She nodded.
"Henley can take over for you," the woman said. She brought her wrist to her mouth—wrist communicators; Paris wasn't even sure if his father had used such technology in his decades-long Starfleet career—and said something Paris didn't catch. "She'll be up in a few," the woman informed him.
"Thanks," Paris replied, feeling his anxiety drop a few notches. Maybe he'd get through this intact and live to take another contract after all.
For the next two days, he alternated between the helm and the berth, with occasional side trips to the replicator for something to eat. It was during one of those stays in the berth that the ship shook enough to shake him right out of that narrow cot. "What the fuck?" He asked, rising to his feet. The ship didn't have any sort of red alert-like system like a Starfleet ship would have had, but he filled that absence in in his head, imagining the red lights and blaring klaxons.
The angry shouts of the crew didn't really fit into his imagined Starfleet scenario, but he was working on being more flexible.
The scenario on the bridge wasn't much better, with Mike in the tactical seat and Seska at the helm. "What the fuck?" he asked again.
"Cardassians," Mike replied, just as the ship shook again from another direct hit.
"Move!" Paris snapped at Seska.
"I've got it!" She snapped back, right when the Cardassian phasers made contact with their hull.
"Clearly not!"
She glared at him, but finally stepped away from the helm.
Paris remembered all of the Starfleet maneuvers well enough that he didn't even have to think of them, his hands working the controls while he studied the charts. "We're close enough to the Badlands," he said. "Mike, keep them off us long enough to get us inside. They won't follow us in."
"Sure," Mike replied.
The hardest thing for new pilots to grasp was the orientation of space. Whether growing up on a planet or a station, everything was two dimensional; you got around by navigating in a cardinal direction. You didn't travel from city to city by going up or down. Space was different, but new pilots still thought of things as forwards and backwards or straight lines, and forgot that there was no such thing as direction in space. There was no north or south, east or west, and technically, no up and down, but the explanation of why there was no up and down went into the realm of that advanced subspace geometry course Paris had really liked at the Academy. He had heard of more than one cadet who ran into an asteroid just past Mars, because they forgot that such things didn't just exist in a straight line.
Fortunately for all of them on the Val Jean, Tom Paris had been flying since he was 8. He hadn't had time to formulate ideas about the orientation of the universe before he went out into it.
The best place to evade into the Badlands wasn't to their right or left. Without getting into the geometry of it, it would be easiest to say it was right above them.
It was a tense half an hour of flying, between avoiding the Cardassian phasers and the plasma storms in the Badlands. "They're gone," Mike announced in that way of his, as if he was announcing nothing more exciting than a new replicator menu.
"Glad to hear it," Paris replied tightly.
By his estimation, they had another 12 to 14 hours of the worst of the plasma storms. And maybe another five or six hours after that before he would feel comfortable turning the helm over to someone else.
In his months of flying in this sector, this segment was both the worst and the best segment in all the routes. It was the best because it was interesting and actually allowed him to use the skills he spent a lifetime developing. It was the worst because it was long and exhausting.
He didn't know how long he had spent alone on the bridge, navigating around the plasma storms, when Torres came and dropped into the engineering/ops station in a huff. "We finally finished the critical repairs from that little stunt you pulled," she said hotly, her eyes fixed down on the controls.
"Me?" He echoed in disbelief. "I was asleep! Seska was at the helm. And I have no idea who turned off the proximity alerts!" She looked at him, appearing confused. "I set proximity alerts," he explained needlessly. "Since I usually do this route alone."
She was still staring at him as if trying to figure out who or what he was. "That's not what Seska said," she finally said. He shrugged.
"Okay?" he asked. He couldn't control what other people on the ship said, and if they wanted to make him the scapegoat, he could live with that, as long as they all emerged alive and Chakotay continued to employ him. Torres was still looking at him, and finally huffed out a breath of air and returned her attention to the controls. He didn't know if that meant she believed him or not, but as long as she didn't kill him, he didn't really care.