Winter's Child, continued.
It's the nature of children, to accept and adapt to their surroundings, but teenagers are better at rebellion than acceptance. At four, at seven, I knew that there was a world beyond the ice, but I didn't imagine myself going there; in our games we rebuilt the ship and resurrected the crew, but we never explored an alien world or placed ourselves at Starfleet headquarters. I wanted to see sunshine, nebulae, oceans, cities, and to hear orchestras or the babble of a thousand people all talking at once, but I didn't think I ever would. It wasn't part of my world.
As a small child, I met the bounds of my world with mute resignation, but as I grew up I was increasingly frustrated by how close and firm those boundaries were. Voyager began to feel smaller, and what the crew had to teach answered fewer of my questions. I got to know all of those endless rooms below, and the faces of the dead were familiar. Hard as I looked, I could find no new corners, and I started taking risks to uncover more. I didn't tell anyone when I crawled through the crushed remains of the warp core, knowing that I could easily contract antimatter radiation sickness if any of the physical containment systems had breached. I worked for hours to open the airlocks and escape pod ports, so that I could slip out between the hull and the ice. Even when it yielded no useful information, I fought for each new inch.
But with each centimeter of hull, scraped and scarred beneath my hands, my world got smaller. Each minute spent crouching in engineering waiting for a brief flare of the matter/antimatter reaction took another wonder from those I could discover there. It sank in that I would never have another world to explore: the dome of the bridge would forever be my sky.
The year I was twelve, Beth died. Her creeping paralysis had made it harder and harder for her to digest anything; she was weakened by malnutrition and slowly losing her dexterity. One night, she simply left her gel pack outside her blankets when she drifted off to sleep. Without any nerve response in her extremities to alert her, the cold stopped her heart, and she never woke up.
The crew had gathered on the bridge for two weddings, and crowded into Jefferies tubes for four births, but this was the first funeral in thirteen years. We wrapped Beth in her blankets and carried her below decks. It was my mother who knelt by her, uncovered her face and whispered, "I am so, so sorry, Beth." She slipped a single apple blossom between Beth's icy hands before turning to us. "We know why we are gathered here today, but that makes it no less shocking, no less heartbreaking."
During the service, I watched the flower between Beth's pale fingers. It was a hybrid plant, a cross that if let develop would yield a small, bitter fruit, and away from the lights it began to freeze. The green-white petals were shot through with dark streaks of ice, and I imagined that if I touched it now, it would shatter.
Afterwards, my mother stood for a few moments more by the body, already white and dusted with frost, then headed off down the corridor away from the rest of the crew. I watched her go, and felt a hand on my shoulder. "She should come above with us," I said aloud, reading the anger and guilt in her sharp steps.
"She needs to grieve," Tom said quietly. Behind us, the last of the mourners climbed into the Jefferies tube.
"She's not grieving." I was surprised to hear the sharp edge in my voice. "She's blaming herself." I turned and met his eyes; they were such a bright blue, and his cheeks were streaked with frozen tears.
"Don't be too angry with her, Beatrice. She doesn't know how to stop." His hand slipped from my shoulder, and he turned away. "Don't stay too long," he said, before folding himself through the door.
"It'll kill her," I whispered. It was hard, to break the solitude that surrounded her, but for the first time I broke it. As she disappeared around the corner, I hurried after her, my footsteps thudding in the snow. I wasn't sure what I was going to say to her; I knew that I couldn't understand the burden she still carried, and I couldn't ask her to set it down. At that moment, though, I could no more leave her alone than I could set her free.
She heard my steps, but she didn't turn around, and when I caught up with her, she didn't say a word. Together, we walked the halls with a slow, measured pace that let her look into every face. When we rounded the deck, I followed her down to the next, and the next after that. Step by step, fabric rustled around us, layers and layers that shielded us from the cold; our breath crackled in the thin air.
It wasn't until we'd passed every last body and returned to Beth's side that she spoke. She sank to her heels, and without looking up at me, murmured, "You should go up, Bea."
"I'm staying as long as you are."
As a captain's daughter, I suspect I'm immune to the glares that reduce junior officers to jelly. Lucky for me, because a green ensign in that corridor with me might not have survived: I had stepped into her most private pain. I looked down at her without flinching; in the dim light, her eyes were dark and piercing. The shadows slid over the hollows of her cheeks, and though she was thin and tired I saw something in her interrupted grief that she'd never let me see before.
And to my surprise, she smiled, a wry, crooked grin that transformed her features. "Not going to leave me alone, are you?" I had never seen a smile look so sad.
"No," I said quietly, crouching down too. "I think I've done that enough."
She sighed. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you took lessons in this, Bea, and from someone other than Tom and Tuvok." A long silence fell between us, and when she spoke again, I wasn't sure she expected an answer. "What did I do to make you such a grown-up?"
"You didn't do that. The cold did." I shrugged, and sank down to sit on my heels. "You can't blame yourself for everything."
She fell sideways to sit too, her legs folded beneath her. "The cold," she said, and her voice was brittle. "The cold, and the crash, and a foolhardy decision I made for all of us." She gestured up and down the hall, and I got the sense that she was talking to Beth, not me. "I didn't have to. I could have ordered everyone to dismantle the drive, and they would have done it without question. But I – I just wanted to get home so badly. I thought it was worth the risk, but I never thought that I'd be the one to live."
I didn't say anything. When they told the story, no one had ever blamed her for the crash, but I knew that the responsibility was ultimately the captain's. There was nothing to be said, in the face of protocol.
"No. I thought that I was risking my life as much as theirs. Either we'd all make it, or none of us would, but we'd be together in the attempt. And instead… well. Instead I get to live on as the selfish, wrong-headed captain who put her needs ahead of the crew's."
"You're hardly living on in luxury," I said softly, wondering what needs she imagined she had that the crew didn't. Hadn't they all wanted to get home?
"But I'm living, Beatrice," she said. "I'm living, and it cost their lives to get me here." She reached out, and folded my icy fingers in her own. "And then I did something even stupider: I brought you here, too. I gave this life to a child who will outlive me, and never see the stars."
I swallowed, hard. She was honest, but private: though she answered every question put to her, told me the unvarnished truth, I studied silence at her knee. To hear express so bluntly the anger that I nursed was surprising, and made that anger seem childish. "Maybe I will," I said.
She closed her eyes, composing herself, and turned her face toward mine. "I hope so, Bea. But if you never do, promise me that you forgive me."
I almost asked, for what? But I didn't need to force her to say it; she didn't have to admit that she would rather be a childless captain of a living crew than my mother and captain to the dead. She didn't have to say that she thought that being a child here, on an icy, dead ship, was worse than not being born. If she had said that she regretted my birth, she would have thought that I doubted how much she loved me.
"Of course I do," I said, and in that moment, it was true. She didn't have to know that I understood perfectly, and she couldn't have understood that to me, her regret only proved her love.
Though communications had never been her expertise, B'Elanna took on Beth's projects, plunking herself down about four months later in the corner of the conference room where Beth had worked. It took only a few hours of scrutinizing Beth's equations and examining her circuitry before B'Elanna walked across the room to where Joe, Naomi, Eddie and I were preparing dinner. She gently set a device down on the table.
"She did it," she said, and her voice was almost fragile. "She must have connected every interlink by hand, without a hyperspanner, but – except for the power cell, which is going to take some creative engineering – she built a transceiver." She sank into one of the chairs, staring at the little machine. It was a mess, made up of pieces and wires snatched from Voyager's useless systems, but I could almost see what B'Elanna saw. It was good work, and might just have been our miracle.
Joe cautiously picked it up and began to run his hands over the connections. "I wonder how she dealt with the targeting problem," he said, to no one in particular, then turned the device over and laughed. Embedded in the wires was Beth's commbadge. "Brilliant. That would adjust the carrier wave to Starfleet frequencies, and boost its range."
"And preserve power, if it's not sending on every channel at once," Eddie said, interested now. "Can we get it to transmit?"
"We'd better," B'Elanna said grimly. Her eyes fixed on the machine in Joe's hands, she said softly, "I wonder if she knew how close she was."
"She must have. She was a good engineer," Eddie said. He pushed himself to his feet and walked around the table, dropping a hand on her shoulder as he headed back out toward the garden. "It was an accident, B'Elanna. She didn't do it on purpose."
"I'd like to believe that." B'Elanna leaned on her elbows, twisting her fingers together. Naomi and I glanced at each other as we shelled peas. Beth had worked in engineering, and had been trying to manually align the manifolds on the chief engineer's orders; her spine had been injured when the ship set down and the nearest console had exploded, sending debris everywhere. In B'Elanna's thin, lined face and mournful brown eyes, I saw an echo of my mother's grief, and wondered how she atoned.
It took several months more to build a power cell that wouldn't overload the delicate device but would still transmit through the ice. B'Elanna grew more and more frustrated with the limited technology at her disposal; standard Starfleet instrumentation used up enormous amounts of power, and could, due to the efficiency and cleanliness of the antimatter reaction. But with a cold warp core, even the easiest things were difficult, and over the years the lights, supplemental oxygen production, and Joe's cooking devices had been switched from the ship's power grid to stored energy from the dynamo. Now, calibrating the cell to emit a steady SOS with a very unsteady power source took all B'Elanna's patience and creativity.
We all gathered to turn it on and watched in silence as B'Elanna connected the power cell to Beth's transmitter. A miniscule yellow light on the transceiver lit up, and we stood for several minutes watching it blink, this tiny beacon that was the first complete device made with the ruined computer core and the shorted circuitry and was our first connection to the rest of the galaxy.
We knew it might only transmit as far as the planet's star, that we could be in an uncharted and empty region with no passing ships, that we could still be in the Delta Quadrant for all we knew. We threw a party anyway.
For a few bright weeks, I was sure it was all over. The scale of the universe was beyond me, and it seemed impossible that some ship wouldn't wander by and pick up the steady beeping of our signal. I paid particular attention to Tuvok's lessons, sure that I would soon be in a Federation school, and Zayek and I abandoned our games to speculate wildly about life on Earth.
The adults, though, didn't seem as positive. They checked the transceiver logs whenever they passed, too, and they seemed to think of our rescue as inevitable. But they weren't happy about it, exactly. Oh, they told more stories about their families and their homes, and Eddie couldn't hide his excitement at introducing his mother to Ada. It was with muted trepidation, though, that Greg mentioned his sons, my mother Starfleet, or Tuvok his wife, and in the face of those responsibilities the compromises they had made to stay alive stood out sharply.
But weeks, and then months, passed, and there was never a blip on the transceiver. The galaxy slowly shrank again, until the Federation was the stuff of stories and the deck ten the furthest reaches of the world. Slowly, the excitement and the tension receded, until it faded into the dim rhythm of chores and meals and shivering nights. There were classes, crises, and a new baby; I had no thoughts to spare for the remote possibility of rescue. By my fourteenth birthday, checking the transceiver daily was a routine that hardly anyone kept up. Except for occasional calibrations to the carrier wave, we stopped trying to find the universe, busy with survival.
It never occurred to us that the universe might find us on its own.