Winter's Child, continued.
Captain LaForge waited almost forty-five minutes before he hailed again. Harry, Tessa, and Chakotay had by that time explained their plans in full to my mother and the other adults, but once that was done we lapsed into listless waiting. B'Elanna took back her daughter and sat cross-legged on one of the bunks in the crew cabin to nurse; promising a game, Zayek took little Harry and Ada below to the lab. My mother and Chakotay retreated to the cockpit, his hand hovering over the small of her back, and with tacit approval the rest of us settled ourselves on the bunks and against the walls.
It may seem strange, but no one said a word. We all had a thousand questions, and just as many speculations, but there would be time enough for all our hopes and worries later. When my mother returned to the room, she stepped into a taut silence; Juliet and Eddie scrambled to their feet, and Tuvok straightened his shoulders.
She cleared her throat. "The Challenger is standing by to beam us to their transporter room," she said, and from the way her voice grated I guessed that she and Chakotay had sat in silence, too. "When we're ready."
Tom helped his wife to her feet and called down the corridor for the other children. "I'd say we're ready now," he said.
She looked from one face to the next, searching for something; she finally nodded, and pressed a panel on the console by the door. "Delta Flyer to Challenger."
"Challenger here. Now, Captain?"
"Yes." She took a deep breath, and said, "Eighteen to beam up."
Fifteen years studying Voyager had taught me about the nuts and bolts of starship construction. I knew the wiring plan for the EPS relays, what a deflector dish was made of, and how to follow a warp core schematic scratched in frost on the floor. I had touched the delicate tendrils of the oxygen filtration villi, and I knew what happened when a bioneural gel pack burst. I could probably have navigated the Jefferies tubes of the Challenger better than her crew, but still: nothing prepared me for a living ship.
Challenger shone. The bulkheads were a matte white-grey, the carpets darker but spotless; schematics lit in brilliant colors flashed from every panel. There were indicators and monitors and flashes I couldn't even guess at. Everything made noise; consoles beeped and hummed, and I could hear the subtle pulse of the power grid in every wall. Every door opened before we got there, and the corridors were empty except for bustling crewmen.
The crew shone, too. Uniforms black and grey and immaculately pressed, their boots clacking on the deck, their faces scrubbed. I had never seen men and women so neat; not a hair was out of place. Standing by the ensign assigned to show my mother and me to our quarters, I could feel the dirt on my face and the wisps of hair pulling out of my braid, and it was a relief when the door slid shut behind us and we were left alone.
It was the first chance I'd had to catch my breath since we'd arrived. LaForge had met us himself, in one smooth motion welcoming the survivors back to the Federation and sending our rescuers to the brig. Harry and Tessa stepped forward immediately with a quick glance at my mother, but Chakotay had twined his fingers with her own and raised her hand to his lips before surrendering to the grim lieutenant by the door. I caught the flicker that passed through the small fleet of ensigns that stood by, but LaForge didn't say a word, just asked if we would rather go to sickbay or guest quarters.
In the spacious guest suite, my mother wasted no time in stripping off her tunic, skirt, and trousers, dropping them untidily on the floor by the bathroom before going, nude and barefoot, to turn on the sonic shower. We had no secrets from each other; we had shared a tiny sleeping space for fourteen years, and shared a rare bath in a cargo container full of scalding water more than once. Modesty was a luxury we had never had, and I could hear her sigh as the shower lifted years of grime away.
I slid my shoes off and padded to the window. The planet still turned below; at my mother's request, the Challenger was staying in orbit until we had a chance to pay our last respects. I ignored the marvels around me – the replicator, the desk terminal, even the running water and soft beds. I knew what they were for, but I had no idea what I would do with them.
My mother found me like that ten minutes later. Still bone dry but wrapped in a towel, she was cleaner than I had every seen her, her skin restored to a delicate cream, the grey shining silver in her loose hair. "Go on," she said, "Get yourself clean and I'll replicate you something to wear."
I hesitated in the door of the bathroom, fumbling with the ties of my skirt. "I don't – " I started, but I wasn't sure how to finish. I felt unsteady, foolish; I didn't even know how to take a shower.
She smiled, almost sadly. "Just tell the computer to begin sonic shower sequence."
When I left the bathroom, covered in a bright white towel and still buzzing with the sound waves, the woman who greeted me was my mother as I'd never seen her before. The narrow lines of her body were defined by slim grey slacks and a tailored white tunic; her hair was pinned at the base of her neck, and though her feet were bare she carried a pair of shining boots in one hand. The only familiar thing was her commbadge, the same battered and bent insignia that she had worn every day since the crash: it shone on the creamy wool.
She was talking to the captain over an open channel; I heard him say, "We're placing the Delta Flyer under armed guard in the shuttle bay until we find it. Are you sure they didn't bring it to the ship and hide the device somewhere?"
"Quite sure," she said, raising her eyebrows at me in an expression of incredulous impatience. "I assure you, Captain, neither Harry nor Chakotay showed me the transceiver, or crawled into the warp manifolds to hide it. We spent the whole time on the bridge and in the conference room, and they were never alone there."
"I'll take you at your word, Captain. LaForge out."
She sat on the couch to pull on her boots, and handed me a neatly folded pile of clothes. "They can't find the temporal transceiver," she said, gesturing at the communication panel dismissively. I didn't reply, too busy examining the garments she had replicated for me. Getting dressed had always been a hassle before, layering leggings and trousers under heavy skirts, coats and cloaks. I had left eleven pieces of outer clothing in the Delta Flyer, not counting my gloves, socks, and the scarf that covered my head. This, though, was easy: over underclothes that fit perflectly, I slid on the pale green tunic, fastening the buttons along my shoulder, and stepped into the charcoal trousers.
My mother looked me up and down, reaching out to tug the tunic into place. I felt exposed in the form-fitting clothes, and I smoothed the fabric over my belly and squared my shoulders, posing for her. "Do I look okay?"
I expected her to laugh, but she just pulled me to sit beside her, and said in a muted tone, "You're lovely, Bea." A pause, a sigh. "It's even easier to see your father in you now." She combed through my hair with her fingers before reaching out for the brush. "But do you ever brush your hair?"
"Sometimes." I closed my eyes; except that it was so warm, we might have been curled up in the Jefferies tube, my mother braiding my hair before bed as she had my whole life. Comforted, I asked a question that had been nagging at me. "Mama, why did they need to come here to use the transceiver?" They already had it, and it didn't matter where the correction was sent from. "Was it just to say goodbye?"
"I think that was part of it, but no." She sighed again. "It was really clever, actually. They were going to send the right phase correction directly to Seven of Nine, and they stole the temporal transceiver to do it. But they didn't know when we crashed, and without knowing that the correction wasn't much good." With nimble fingers she began an intricate plait. "So they thought – and quite rightly – that they could use Seven of Nine's implants to determine her time of death, and thus, the moment of the crash."
"Because she died on impact."
"Because they thought we all died on impact." She tapped my shoulder, and I handed her the sparkling silver band to finish the braid; it seemed that even hair elastics on a living ship shone. "Of course, she did. It would have worked."
"But they could have figured it out the way Beth did," I said, turning to her and pulling my legs up on the couch. "By using the last sensor data to pinpoint the moment of the crash and the probable location."
"Yes, but that took Beth years, and with a working computer core would still have taken days, maybe even weeks." She smiled grimly, and pushed herself to her feet. I still wasn't used to her tiny, uninsulated silhouette. "They expected to be on the run, remember. Now come on," she added, throwing a pair of socks at me.
"Where are we going?" I asked, pulling them on. I couldn't even guess what other surprises the day would hold. "Sickbay? Like Captain LaForge said?" I thought, then ventured, "The holodeck? Someplace new?"
"Oh, no," she said, softly. The replicator shimmered, and the woven polymer of an environmental suit like that Chakotay and Harry had worn appeared. "No, Bea. We need to go and say goodbye."
Out of respect or curiosity, and probably to scan surreptitiously for the missing transceiver, some of the Challenger's senior officers joined us on the transporter pad. Six at a time, we were beamed onto the bridge, and though they gasped at the cold, the darkness, and the wreckage, I felt relieved. It had only been a few hours, so I shouldn't have been surprised that nothing had changed, but I was, and seeing my book abandoned on the floor behind ops and Maddie's latest construction project scattered across the lower deck reassured me.
Though I unfastened the jacket and pushed back the clunky hood, LaForge shivered even the through the heavy polymer suit. He stood back at watched as the children ran from room to room and the adults disappeared into the Jefferies tubes. His first officer, though, a lanky Bajoran with bright eyes, ran her gloved hands over the dead panels and examined each dark console.
"Unbelievable," she murmured.
"Commander Luta?" LaForge asked, gently, as she slid tentatively into conn and stared into the dead viewscreen.
"It's just – I read about Voyager, at the academy, Captain. My senior year, shortly after the Delta Flyer returned, the Dominion War had heightened everyone's interest in the Maquis and potential reconciliation. One of my senior projects was designing a training simulation based on the integration of the crews."
"Interesting," the captain said, moving over to stand behind her.
"It's what brought me into the diplomatic corps," she said, glancing around the dark bridge. "What I would give to have spoken to any of those Maquis, especially the Bajorans – how did Janeway manage it? Making them loyal to Starfleet, after everything that had happened to them?"
LaForge glanced around the empty bridge. "You could ask Janeway, Dhen," he said.
She spun, taking in the whole room at once. "I don't think so," she said, fixing her eyes on the command chairs. "The captain who did that – I think she died here." She stood up with a sigh. "If anyone was born to be a captain, it was her."
"You studied her at the academy, too?"
Luta Dhen laughed, a wry snort through her nose. "I was taking a class taught by Paris when she was presumed dead after being lost in the slipstream. He made her required reading." She saw me standing by the door, but turned back to her captain and said, softly, "A leader like her – her ship dies, her crew dies. How can she not go with them? Even if she keeps living."
LaForge twisted his lips. "I don't know," he said, softly. "She's a remarkable woman, and unless I miss my guess, she's still Voyager's captain." He led her toward the conference room, prying open the reluctant doors, and as he slipped between them he said, "I'm not sure she can be anything else. Maybe that's the real loss."
The ready room, the conference room, the garden, the bridge: we passed through each room we had lived in. I committed it to memory, and from time to time my mother tucked something in her pocket – photos of lost friends, gifts given her, her pips. We had already decided not to take much, but I couldn't resist taking Beth's handwritten logs or the baby blanket Naomi had stitched for me from the scraps of her own.
Saying goodbye below deck one, though, was harder: with the exception of Beth, we had never known any of these people personally. It was hard to say goodbye to people who had only ever been stories to us. I lead Harry, Ada, and Zayek away from the stiff Starfleet officers, shocked into silence by the dead, and we walked slowly around the deck. When we reached an access tube, Ada slid her gloved hand into mine and tried to tug me towards it.
"Let's go home," she said.
"We'll go back to the Challenger soon," I said, pulling her along. "Just a few more minutes."
She looked up at me with somber brown eyes. Her even tone breaking, she said, "But when are we going home?"
Puzzled, I said, "We're going to Earth, Ada, we'll get there in a few days, and then – "
"Not Earth," Harry said, looking from Ada's increasing frustration to me. "Home, Bea. She wants to know when we're going home."
Over his coppery head, Zayek met my eyes but said nothing: as the eldest and captain's daughter, it was my responsibility to explain. "You mean, upstairs. Voyager's bridge." Of course. What else did home mean? It wasn't Earth, or Vulcan, or Betazed; those places, like the ship in orbit, had never been real to us before today. Home was a hollow, clanging ship where the power grid crackled during ice storms. Home was shivering and sleeping nestled against your parents with a gel pack at your back. Ada looked at me steadily. Home was bland wheat bread; what did chocolate mean to her?
"We're going to leave Voyager. We have to. We're going back to where our parents came from, where their families are."
She frowned, and gripped my hand tighter. "Will it be warm?" she asked. "Like on that ship?"
"Yes," I said. "It will."
She looked to Harry, who rubbed his ridges with the back of his hand before saying, "It's too warm there."
What could I say to that? I knew how my mother would have responded, and what any of the adults walking the halls expected me to say: you'll get used to it, and like it when you do. I should have told them that humans and Vulcans and Klingons were never meant to live in this kind of cold, said that we would all be happier and healthier. And yet, on the Challenger, I'd been aware of my bare head too, always waiting for the sting of the cold; I'd felt smothered and claustrophobic in the mild air.
So I told the truth. "Yeah," I said, turning back toward the corridor, her mittened hand in mine. "It is."
Even more strange than the Challenger's clean, warm corridors were all the people. Nine decks among fifteen people is plenty, even when eight of them go unused, and Zayek and I had never had trouble finding a private corner for a conversation, or just to sharpen our rummy skills in preparation for the next bout with Tom. After we left orbit, though, we discovered that doing the same on this ship was going to be impossible: every room was occupied and the curious looks were more than enough to send us scurrying for the next nook.
Finally, we tried the one place more familiar to us than any other: the Jefferies tubes. Though the hallways and crew quarters were dramatically different than Voyager's, there the absence of frost was the only difference, and we immediately felt at home. We crawled through the humming ship until we found an out-of-the-way junction far away from important system relays; we dangled our legs over the side of the chute and sat in silence for several minutes.
It was Zayek who spoke first. "How do you think Ada's grandparents will react to an adopted half-Vulcan child?"
She had been on my mind too. "How will they react to their sons' marriage?" Greg at least had left behind a wife and children, and I couldn't imagine that his sons would welcome a stepfather without some confusion or resentment. Would it be enough that he was alive, or would it still sting that he, like Tuvok, had broken faith? "What about you, Zayek? Will you stay with your mom or Tuvok?"
"I'm not certain. My father will likely wish to return to Vulcan, but…" Zayek trailed off. We rarely mentioned T'Pel and Tuvok's four elder children, the pon farr and the circumstances of Zayek's birth, but I could hear the worry in his voice. Those circumstances were about to confront all of us.
"I'm sure he'd like to take you there," I said. He said nothing, just swung his legs more forcefully. "But I'd like it if you stayed on Earth. Nearby."
"Will your mother return to Starfleet?" He sounded relieved at the change of subject.
"I don't know." I couldn't imagine that she would want to captain another ship, or sit behind a desk at Starfleet Headquarters, but all the same, it was at the center of her life: what else would she do? My mother as anyone other than Captain Janeway didn't make much sense to me. "She's never said – what she'd like to do if we get rescued. Not like everyone else."
We lapsed into silence again. All around us, relays clicked and hummed, sending power, oxygen, and information to every corner of the ship. I closed my eyes and imagined that we were back on Voyager; maybe deck twelve or thirteen, way down between the nacelles and the warp core where the power grid would have the most dense. I knew which crewmen belonged in the surrounding sections, and one by one I placed them. I was just moving to deck eleven when Zayek interrupted my mental shipbuilding.
"Is it really better this way, Bea?"
I was startled by the emotion in his voice: his deliberate Vulcan calm was gone, and he was the child I remembered him being on the coldest nights, in the worst ice storms. He sounded frightened and worried and very, very human. "What do you mean?"
His knuckles, clenched on the corner of the ledge, were white. "They could have reset the timeline, but they didn't. Harry, Chakotay and Tessa chose not to deliberately end the lives of their friends or erase their friends' children from history." He cleared his throat, his hand jammed in his pocket. "They abandoned their plans for us, Bea, but our – our homecoming hardly seems worth it."
I drew in a breath, but I couldn't argue; the frozen expressions of the crew haunted me, too. "It doesn't matter, anyway. The transceiver is gone."
In reply, he pulled his legs up and scooted away from the edge. I stared down at the bottom of the shaft, painting ice crystals on the walls. Behind me, he said, "Bea – " I spun around, and met Zayek's liquid eyes for a brief second before he dropped the compact grey device with a clatter on the decking.