The Contractor: Chapter 4
Torres and Paris worked side by side in silence on the bridge for well over two hours, her still working on repairing systems from that impromptu Cardassian attack and him still navigating through the thickest of the plasma storms. He had no idea what time it was when she finally leaned back in her seat and let out an exhausted sigh. "We still have about 11 hours until we're through this section of the Badlands," Paris said. "Things calm down a bit after that, but we won't be out of the Badlands for a few more days."
"I've flown this route before," she snapped at him.
"Sorry," he said defensively. "Just wanted to make sure to give you a timeline for repairs."
She glared at him briefly but didn't reply, and then returned to face forward and closed her eyes as she leaned her head back. Sitting there like that, looking as tired as she looked, Paris realized that she was probably younger than he initially thought. Then again, he had no idea how Klingons aged—she could have been 10 or 40 or anywhere in between—but sitting there, her head back and her eyes closed, she looked impossibly young for being out here, flying through the Badlands while evading Cardassians and Starfleet and who knew who else. Not that he had much room to talk; he was still short of a quarter century himself. Chronologically, anyway. He felt older. He had made enough mistakes to be much older. "When was the last time you slept?" he asked, realizing after the words left his mouth how patronizing they sounded.
"I don't sleep much," she replied. She didn't snap at him that time; her words were matter-of-fact, and he took that to mean that she actually didn't sleep much and probably preferred working on the engines to whatever else there was to do on a Maquis ship. Keeping the ship running probably gave her enough to do that she could easily stay busy without trying.
"So," he asked a few minutes later. "Is it me you don't like, or is it all contractors?"
She was still leaning back in her chair, but her lips quirked slightly at the question. "It's not that I don't like you," she said. "I don't know you, and I don't trust you. I don't have a tendency to trust any mercenaries."
He winced slightly at the word; he preferred 'contractor,' even though he knew that 'mercenary' was probably a better fit, given that he was flying for people who made a business out of seeding war. "And why's that?" He asked, keeping his voice intentionally light.
"Because there's nothing stopping you from selling us out to someone paying you more."
He snorted at that. "You must not know how criminally underpaid I am."
To his surprise, she chuckled. "Oh, we know," she informed him. "We just didn't realize you knew."
He smiled at that as well; he had to admit that getting fleeced by a Maquis commander was a little funny, even though that meant he was laughing at his own expense. "I just want to fly," he assured her.
"There are other places you could do that," she pointed out. "You don't need to literally get in bed with the Maquis just to fly."
"There aren't," he informed her with a slight shake of the head. "Nobody else would let me get within 50 meters of a helm station. Not with my record."
"What'd you do, crash a ship?" She asked with a snort, and like that, it was as if he was back at Caldik Prime.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "A shuttle, but… yeah." She went quiet at his admission, but he didn't know if it was his words or the fact that he had said them.
"Big deal," she said a few seconds later, trying but failing to keep that same light bluster in her voice. "People crash shuttles all the time."
"They do," he confirmed with a nod. "What got me kicked out of Starfleet and exiled out here was the fact that people died. And I lied about it." He focused his attention on his hands, watching them as they moved along the controls in efforts of not thinking about that day.
"How many?" She asked. He didn't like talking about it, but for some reason, sitting there with the pinks and purples of the plasma storms streaming in from the view screen, alone on the bridge, he found himself talking.
"Three," he said. "Al-Agba, O'Sullivan, Landen." He paused, then amended, "Django, Divya, and Ren. We had been lower decks together." He looked over at Torres and explained, "It was the first assignment for all of us. Ensigns shared these tiny quarters in the bowels of the ship and most of our work was on the lower decks."
"I thought pilots were always on the bridge."
He smiled at that. "Common misperception," he joked. "I had the occasional bridge post, but most of the time I was taking shuttles out for routine check flights and filling in for the senior pilots when they stepped out for lunch or something. Divya was the first promoted—engineers usually are. I was next. Django and Ren were still ensigns." He winced at the memory. They had been friends, and like all friends in such an environment like the lower decks of a large spaceship, celebrated each other's victories while dying a little inside at the realization that it hadn't been you. "Divya may have been the senior officer—by a month—but I was the pilot, the one on the command track. It was my first time commanding an away mission, and, well." He trailed off, trying to convince himself that the plasma storms he was seeing wasn't the impending collision with a planet. "I crashed the shuttle on the way down, which put a pretty rapid end to my first command. It was my fault, but I blamed it on one system or another, said that Divya must have missed it on the checks." Torres still wasn't saying anything, and he blew out a stream of air in something that might have been a laugh and might have been a sob. "Kicker was, they believed me," he said. "Turns out, you can kill three of your friends and Starfleet won't bat an eye."
"So what happened?"
He didn't answer her for a minute, his eyes again on his hands. "As it happens, confessing that you lied during the investigation doesn't make the guilt go away, but it is something that Starfleet does have a big problem with it. There was another investigation, there was an inquest, and we parted ways." He paused to focus on that plasma storm. "Also turns out, drinking dulls the pain a little bit. Or, at least, makes you care less about it. The only time I can stop focusing on the accident is when I'm focusing on flying. And nobody back in the civilized parts of the Federation are willing to take their chances on an often-drunk pilot who crashed a shuttle, lied about it, and got cashiered out of Starfleet."
This was more than he had said to anybody, including the Starfleet-mandated counselor as he was in the process of being kicked out, and he didn't know why B'Elanna Torres would be the person he would talk to, especially immediately after her blunt declaration that she didn't trust him. "And all of that led you to a bar in the fringes of the Federation, just waiting for some Maquis commander to ask you to fly a shuttle," Torres summed up.
"That's about it," he agreed. "I guess, in summary, I have no desire to sell you out for the highest bidder, because no other bidder is willing to give me the only thing I want. All I want to do is fly."
She had a frown on her face as she studied him for a long minute. "So Chakotay and others pay you to fly, but for how long? Until you're caught? Until you're killed?"
"I haven't thought about it," he admitted. "I just… can't make any plans longer than my next contract." He didn't know how to explain it. He had never been all that good at planning to begin with—it seemed like a waste of energy growing up, as his father put an inordinate amount of energy into planning his next move for him, and then his Starfleet career had ended before he got to the point that he had any authority to make any decisions of any consequences—and now he didn't know how to do it and didn't know how to learn. And wasn't sure he wanted to learn. He wouldn't say he enjoyed his current life, the long runs alone in a shuttle separated by drunken binges at port, but it was a pace he could handle. And part of him, maybe the largest part, wasn't sure he deserved better than the purgatory of running supplies for the Maquis, never sleeping well, never quite sure if this run would be his last or not.
"Why don't you just get your own ship?" Torres asked, cutting into his reverie again. "Save up your credits from these supply runs, get a ship with a replicator, float around the cosmos at your leisure. Hell, you can even get a cargo certificate and do this work on the legit side once you get bored with floating around and feeling sorry for yourself."
He couldn't help but smile at her blunt manner, but shook his head. "I'm not ready for that," he said. "Maybe someday. Probably someday. But not yet."
They lapsed into silence again, and although Paris didn't typically like silences—he found them awkward and would say anything and everything that passed through his mind in order to fill them—he found this one companionable, and was content to just sit there with the slight engineer as they bobbed and weaved around plasma storms.
Mike came onto the bridge, and although no words were exchanged, Torres seemed to take that as her cue to leave. "You're an idiot, Tom," she said. There was no malice in her voice, nothing snide or cutting, just a statement of fact.
Paris agreed with her assessment.