Winter's Child, continued.
The day I met my father was also the day I first felt the humming nothingness of the transporter, and ever spent more than a few minutes with my feet bare. It was the first time I left Voyager, the first time I had a replicated meal. My first glimpse of the way things should have been, and of how broken they were.
We sat crowded into the Flyer's crew compartment, children hugged against their parents, gasping as our fingers and toes thawed out. We shed layers and rehashed memories, and within half an hour I was wearing only a single tunic and had heard more about Tom and B'Elanna's courtship from Harry than they'd every let slip before.
Harry and Chakotay replicated a meal for everyone, a patchwork feast of their favorite dishes. The food was a revelation: the colors and the smells were nothing I had ever imagined, nor could have. A meal on frozen Voyager was bland wheat bread, cold-hardy greens which never lost the taste of sour metal, root vegetables roasted, hot bitter tea. This, though, took my breath away – bright fruits and vegetables, cooked a dozen different ways and breads that melted and crumbled and crunched against our teeth. There was cheese and ice cream, things that we children had never encountered and didn't quite trust, and sweet desserts that weren't just fruit preserves. I laughed aloud when I bit into a square of fudge, the dark smooth taste of it, the way it gave way against my lips. How could you explain chocolate? The closest I'd ever come was what my mother called almost-gingerbread, which Joe'd perfected for birthdays.
And I wasn't the only one: Ada's calm was broken as she devoured a banana, and my mother nearly wept at the smell of her coffee. Joe and Eddie were showing little Harry how to roll rice in nori, and Maddie had her eyes closed, the peel of a blood orange held beneath her nose, the fruit itself forgotten on her lap. Harry Kim couldn't stop smiling, so different than the grim atoning man I'd met a few hours ago. And Chakotay – he sat on the floor by B'Elanna and Zayek, cradling Miral in the crook of his arm, leaning against my mother's knees on the bunk behind him. From where I sat, I could see the peace in his eyes as he smiled at the baby, the way he checked in with my mother every few minutes, and the way her hand rested on his shoulder. So even though Tessa stood awkwardly in the doorway, her eyes firmly on Chakotay, and even though we were as crowded as we'd ever been in the Jefferies tubes junctions, I imagined that it was like Voyager again, whole and unfrozen.
Still, though, it was a fragile happiness. It was more like those long nights in the conference room – exchanging stories and memories, keeping the lost alive by reciting their lives one more time. We were all thinking about the hundred and more crewmen missing; in the silence following the slightly embroidered story of the crew's marooning on Hanon IV, my mother raised her hand in a toast, saying hoarsely, "To rescue, and to those for whom the rescue came too late."
Tessa slipped away then. Her expression was inscrutable, and after a few minutes I pushed myself to my feet and murmured something about finding the lavatory. My mother nodded distractedly, but no one paid me any mind as I picked my way around the cabin and slid into the corridor.
She was sitting in the pilot's seat, one hand idly splayed along the controllers. Her dark hair was pulled back, and I stood for a moment, studying her. Her clothes fit her so well, replicated for her rather than tacked together from salvaged uniforms and blankets, and in comparison to the gaunt, weakened adults I'd known even her narrow cheeks seemed full. I slid into other seat, thumping deliberately, and she spun in the chair, startled.
She narrowed her dark eyes at me. "What do you want?" she asked, after a long moment. Her voice was fragile, and in the dark cabin I wondered if there were tears in her eyes.
"Nothing," I said. I looked past her to the windows, the still stars hanging over the icy planet below. "It's just crowded in there."
"Right," she said as she leaned back into the chair. When we had all beamed up, crowding into the aft cabin, Tessa had shaken hands with my mother, her expression guarded, and then suggested that Harry and Chakotay get us all fed before we faded to nothing. She had seemed cheerful enough, but she'd also brushed off introductions, standing outside the crush. And now she looked at me steadily, stripped of that polite, so-glad-we-rescued-you veneer, and I had no idea what to say to her.
She spoke first, and she sounded resigned. "Which one are you?"
"Oh," I said. "Beatrice. Kathryn's daughter."
She closed her eyes. "Ah." She ran a hand over her hair, holding the back of her head for a moment before letting her arm fall to her side. "I've heard a lot about your mother."
"Me too," I said. "But you've probably heard more."
She laughed, eyes still closed. It was a hollow sound. "Wouldn't surprise me," she said. "Harry and Chakotay can't go a day without mentioning her. Mostly, it's Harry: he let her down, and he's never forgiven himself." She opened her eyes and stared out at the glacier below. "I couldn't understand it, at first. I never served in Starfleet, see, I'd never felt that loyalty for my first captain."
There was an ironic bite to her tone, and I had to ask, "Do you now?"
She threw me a sharp look, then exhaled noisily. "No. I don't. Chakotay – tried, he tried to explain it to me, but it didn't show me anything except that he felt the same way. He might not have talked about her, but she was his captain." Her lips twisted in a mirthless smile. "And when he did tell a story about her, she wasn't 'Captain Janeway' at all. She was 'Kathryn.'"
"They were good friends," I said, wondering if Chakotay had ever told her the whole truth. He had paused, when we had transported to the Flyer, taking both her hands and whispering into her ear, but I doubted that much had been said in those few seconds.
She didn't respond to that. "Kathryn, beating them all at pool; Kathryn, bargaining with the Borg; Kathryn, planting tomatoes with bits of garden in her hair." She shook her head. "But he never said she had a child; he only ever mentioned babysitting the little Ktarian girl. But you look old enough to have been around fifteen years ago, just barely."
"No," I said, cautiously. "I was born after the crash."
"Just after, then." Tessa sighed, and twisted the chair to face me again. "There was a lot he never mentioned, though. I had to press him to get stories about Janeway, and if I tried to ask about the other Maquis, it always turned into some story about uniting the crews. Which was really a story about her." She glanced at the door; a swell of laughter drifted through from the aft cabin. "Good friends, huh? Did she talk about him down there?"
"No," I said truthfully. "I never realized how important he was to her, until today." Tessa met my eyes, and I realized instantly it had been the wrong thing to say. "I'm sorry, I meant – "
"Exactly that." She wiped her eyes with back of her hand, almost angrily. "Isn't this terrible? You're alive, and I just keep wishing that we'd found what we'd expected and we could go ahead with things as planned. I'm no good at this," she gestured toward the door, "and I don't belong here."
There was nothing I could say to that. I was sure she had seen the way my mother let her hand fall against Chakotay's shoulder, and I couldn't deny that no one had invited Tessa into the party. We lapsed into a silence; I stared out the window, trying to count the stars, and Tessa stared at me, almost without seeing.
"Beatrice," she said, finally, and I got the feeling that she was forcing herself to get the words out, "did your father survive the crash, too?"
I opened my mouth, but said nothing. From the way her eyes were fixed on my face, I knew that she had seen in me what I had finally glimpsed in Chakotay, just a short hour ago; this was a last and desperate hope. "He – " I began, but I found that I couldn't tell her. "My mother never talked about him," I finished. It wasn't quite a lie.
"Until today," she said, softly, and I knew that she understood.
I echoed, "Until today."
"Oh, God." She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees, cradling her head in her hands. Minutes passed before she spoke again. "I knew," she finally said, not to me at all, "I knew that he'd lost his best friends, his family, here, but I never thought that he meant it literally. It was like I was – oh, I don't know, his salvation." He shoulders shook, but I couldn't tell if she were laughing or crying. "Do you know what it's like, to love a man like him? I had the chance to be his family, to be his everything, and I only had to share him with the dead."
She flinched as another burst of laughter filtered into the dark cabin. "I knew, Beatrice," she said, and she looked up at me, her hands still framing her face, "that as long as he loved me, it didn't really matter that he loved them too, and I told him never to lie to me about that. I thought he hadn't." She bit at the inside of her lip. "But he never told me that he and – he never said he was expecting a child."
"He never knew," I broke in, alarmed by the defeated fury in her eyes. "He didn't lie to you."
"No?" Her voice dropped to a murmur, and it was as though she was fighting to keep her control. "Tell me, how does a man conceive a child aboard a Starfleet ship without meaning to? How, exactly, in the age of standard contraceptive boosters and stupid intimacy protocols, does that happen?"
"I don't – " There was no good answer, and though I didn't doubt the spontaneity of my conception, she made a good point. Lapsed immunizations on a Starfleet ship were rare. "It was – " But I bit my tongue before I finished; 'an accident' wasn't quite right, because I may have been, but I was pretty sure that there had been nothing accidental between my mother and Chakotay that night.
She crossed her arms over her chest, and shook her head, looking away. "It doesn't matter," she said, blinking rapidly. "Whether he – it doesn't matter. There's no part of him that's mine anymore."
"I should go," I said. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to – " I stopped. She was right: it didn't matter what Chakotay had known and what he had chosen to tell her about his captain, because Tessa had lost him as soon as he heard my mother's voice. "I'm sorry," I repeated, sincerely.
A beeping from the communications console interrupted my retreat; we both stared at it for a long moment. Tessa pushed herself to her feet, leaning over the panel, and with a last swipe at her eyes brushed past me and sprinted up the steps to the door.
"Chakotay!" she called, and she was all business, with no hint of the overlooked lover in her voice. "They've found us."
"Let me get this straight," my mother said, a hand on one hip, standing at the rear of the fore cabin. "You two – you three – stole the Delta Flyer and are wanted for treason, and we are being hailed by a Galaxy-class starship sent to bring you in."
Chakotay cocked an eyebrow, but he didn't seem to have an answer. Harry Kim, though, met her eyes; he seemed almost proud. "And stole a Borg temporal transceiver, yes," he said. She tilted her head, waiting. With an impatient sigh, he added, "It's high treason, actually. I think the conspiracy to violate the temporal prime directive got us promoted." The proximity alert beeped again. "Captain, we did what was necessary, and we'll face the music."
She laughed, mirthlessly. "Necessary," she repeated, "and apparently highly illegal." She glanced around the cabin, from Tessa to the survivors crowded in the doorway. Her gaze lingered on Chakotay before she turned back to her grim ensign. "Well, then. Not exactly the greeting I expected from the Federation, but... we have to talk to them, don't we?" She slipped into the copilot's seat. "I'll try not to extend your sentence," she murmured, and swiftly tapped a command. Standing directly behind her, I caught her eye in the darkened screen before the other ship responded. A smile flitted across her face, as though we were sharing a private joke, and then faded into a stern neutrality.
"This is Captain LaForge of the – " The pale prosthetic eyes of the hailing captain widened, but he pushed on. "The Starship Challenger. I was going to say that I was surprised that you hadn't left orbit, but – well, you aren't the rebels I was expecting."
"Captain LaForge," my mother said smoothly. "Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Voyager. Or what's left of her." I wasn't sure if she meant Voyager or herself. She raised her chin, and let the brassy diplomacy drop a little. "You aren't the inexperienced hothead I was expecting, either."
LaForge smiled, almost doubtfully. "Captain Janeway."
"Am I still a captain?" She asked the question easily enough, but her hand strayed to the collar of the tattered grey tunic she wore, and LaForge caught the motion. In the pause that followed, I was sure that he took in her cobbled-together clothes and roughened skin, the grey streaks in her hair, the lines around her eyes from worrying through too many cold nights.
"Yes," he said, quietly, "yes, Captain, I think you are." He exhaled forcefully and leaned in toward the screen. "You understand that I need to take Tessa Omond, Harry Kim and Chakotay into custody."
"As I understand, Captain, you're here to prevent them using a rather ingenious but farfetched plan to change history." She too leaned toward the transmitter, and said, almost conspiratorially, "I think their plans have changed."
"Regardless," LaForge said, and there was a note of genuine regret in his voice.
Chakotay stepped down into the transmitter's sight, Miral still nestled in his arms. "Captain, we're prepared for the consequences of our actions, but we ask that the crew of Voyager not be punished for them." He paused, and glanced around the crowded cabin. "Let them return home. The living and the dead."
My mother straightened, and spoke before LaForge could respond. "Please, give us a little time."
"The Challenger isn't equipped for the kind of recovery operation you want, Chakotay," he said, slowly, distracted by the baby's murmuring, "but I'll back the request for a salvage mission once we get back to Earth. Starfleet might not consider it a priority, but - " He turned his ghostly eyes unflinchingly to my mother's, but it was he who looked away first. "I can give you thirty minutes," he said. "If we detect any transporter or engine activity during that time, we will open fire."
"Understood," my mother said, and her voice caught. "Thank you, Captain."
LaForge nodded, and raised his hand to cut off the signal; before he did, he cleared his throat. "Welcome back," he said, sadly, almost gently, and then the screen went dead.
Thirty minutes. Enough time for Ada to grow impatient with her lessons, or for a half-charged gel pack to go cold; twenty minutes longer than it took to circle deck one, and ten minutes longer than it had taken me to see myself in Chakotay. But not nearly long enough to understand our changed world.
I stared at the Federation seal on the blank screen, aware of the adults pushing into the cabin behind me. I heard B'Elanna shifting and Maddie's shuddering sigh, and noted the stiffness in my mother's shoulders and the way she flinched away from Chakotay's touch. This was all wrong: Starfleet had come, but not to save her or her crew. Instead, they were arresting her officers and tearing her from her lonely vigil.
"Kathryn," Chakotay said, hesitantly, "we always knew there was this risk. We'll have to return to Earth to stand trial, but I'm sure – with your testimony and our sincere apologies – that the charges – "
"Will be dropped," she said, and though she turned toward us she met no one's eyes. I saw it in her face: she was less preoccupied by their imprisonment than by her responsibility. Against every instinct, every unwritten rule, she was preparing to abandon her ship.
"Come on, Kathryn," Tom said, bracingly. One of the blinking lights on the console behind him lit up the hollows of his cheeks, and he took a step toward her, naked compassion in his eyes. He knew what was torturing her; I suspected all the survivors did, but none of us were willing to trespass. "There are plans to be made."
"Yes, of course," she said, and pulled herself up. Her smile was empty, but she headed toward the door, saying, "They probably won't let me speak to any of you before the tribunal, so perhaps we should discuss it now. Harry, Chakotay – " Chakotay looked after her as she moved through the room, surrounded and supported by her crew.
I gave him a rueful smile, and held my arms out for the baby. "Go on," I said. "She needs you there."
He met my smile with his own; it was like looking into a mirror. "Bea," he said, brushing his hand against my shoulder as I shifted Miral's weight in my arms, "I don't know you yet. But I think I'm going to be very proud to be your father."
Zayek, leaning up against the tactical console, favored me with a rare smile, no more than a twitch of his lips. Neither of us moved as the adults filtered from the room; little Harry slipped into the pilot's seat, carefully tracing the controls without pressing anything. Greg whispered in Ada's ear as he too left, and without a word she elbowed her way into the chair with Harry. We may have been privy to every meeting on Voyager, but things were different on a living ship: those decisions weren't ours to make or even witness any more.
Standing on the step, Miral's fingers grasping at my hair, I looked out over the glistening planet below. I tried to make out the curves and colors of Voyager, but she was invisible beneath the milky ice. I couldn't imagine what it was like down there now. In a few days, when the lights ran down, the garden would freeze and life support would fail. The conference room, the Jefferies tubes, my corner behind ops – they would be just like the icy corridors below, edged in frost, and Voyager would be left without a single soul to keep her warm.
It was almost intolerable: the ship had been my first friend, her stories the first I learned. Alone, obscured, a mausoleum for her crew – it wasn't an end that a ship like that deserved.