Winter's Child, continued.

"She was a study in contrasts. As the captain, she was ruled by unyielding morals and a fierce intelligence; children and muttering Maquis would be forgiven for wondering if she slept in her uniform. As a friend, though, she was spontaneous and sensual, and she delighted in good food, holographic moonlight, and the written word."

"Bea!"

"Coming," I called back. I sat on the edge of the bed, balancing the PADD on my knee while I pulled my socks on. Chakotay's essays were a welcome distraction from the prospect of the Challenger's schoolroom, where the children would pass the morning while the adults were debriefed via subspace.

"Wary of her, at first I wasn't sure which was the act. Which was real, the brassy officer, who nonchalantly stared down the machismo of a Kazon Maje, or the romantic who I caught reading Dante at 0200 instead of completing her crew evaluations? In the end, it was the contradictions that convinced me. She ran a tight ship, yet she had a soft spot for misfits; she didn't trust spirituality, but more than once I would have sworn I heard her whisper a prayer. The two Kathryns were hopelessly opposed, yet I finally realized that even she couldn't have separated them."

"Beatrice Teya Janeway." My mother leaned on the door frame, . "Coming, eh?" I smiled up at her sheepishly, wondering where those two Kathryns had gone. I could see the traces of that steely glint and that irrepressible exuberance, but both where muted in her now, tempered by years and sorrow. What was the officer without the bravado, or the unsensual romantic? I hadn't understood before what must have been obvious to the survivors: she was still the captain, but the woman who had lived so fully and immediately was gone. And if she had lost that uniting spark that made her whole, then I had never known Tom or Naomi or Joe, either; were they all so broken? I glanced down at the PADD one more time.

"What impressed me most, I think, was that while for many that struggle between duty and compassion, the official and the private, the self and the soul brings only frustration and fragmentation, somehow it completed her, and it always seemed to me that she embraced the challenges of being captain and Kathryn with imperfect joy."

Joy? Determination, anger, guilt, resignation, yes, but never happiness. I tossed the PADD on the bed and followed her from the room, imagining a living, breathing ship, where being the captain would be an occasion for excitement. There would be room for pride and posturing, misfits and Dante, and for joy - and how different would it be, to be loved by a mother like that?

"It isn't enough."

Zayek and I were sitting side by side at a long table in the Challenger's only classroom. Long-term assignments weren't uncommon on Galaxy-class ships, but there were still only a few children on board, and we were separated into two groups by age. Harry and Ada had been drawn into some inscrutable art project, and we sat solving equations, separated from the neat Federation children by experience and empty air.

The words surprised me; I hadn't meant to say them. We were at the far end of the table, wrangling with mathematics software, trying to ignore the flickering glances of the other students and the solicitous gaze of the senior teacher, a Mr. Drayton. The calculations were simpler than those we'd done with Tuvok and my mother, nothing like the fractal reductions that had plagued us that last morning, but we couldn't get the computer model to work right, and I at least felt like a dunce next to the other children. In my frustration, the words just slipped out.

Zayek looked up at me. I hadn't spoken to him since the teacher had sat us down with the tutor console, and he had honored my silence. We worked together easily without words, taught by years of companionable rewiring and bean-picking, but from the way he kept his eyes fixed on the screen I knew that he was still hurt and confused. Now, though, his brown eyes were opened wide, and it was my turn to stare stubbornly at the misbehaving equations.

"What do you mean?" he whispered, hands still on the keypad.

I glanced toward the instructor; he was at the other end of the table, leaning over two other students. "It's just – Zayek, yesterday when I left, I wanted to believe that everything was fixed. And I've been trying my hardest to pretend that it is."

His voice was low. "But it's not?"

I hit the "execute" command, and watched my model turn into meaningless garbage; it would have taken me fifteen minutes to solve by hand. "No. I thought – well. I thought being on a ship again, having life support and replicators and a computer core, would bring them all back to themselves. You know." I looked away from the static on the screen, finally meeting his eyes. The delicate truth, drawn from Chakotay's essays and my sleepless night, sounded so foolish now. "I hoped my mother would be the intrepid Kathryn Janeway again, and Tom the flyboy, and Naomi would somehow get her childhood back."

"I know," he said, and though I knew what I'd said was silly, there was no ridicule in his tone. "I wanted to throw it away, Bea. I wish I could."

"I know," I echoed. The thing was, I did: as badly as I wanted that transceiver gone, so I could stop second-guessing every luxury the Federation offered, its possibilities were almost hypnotic. I knew that if it were nestled in my pocked, I'd keep it, too.

"How are you guys doing?"

We both looked up, startled; the instructor had made his way around the table, and now stood over us, looking askance at the tangled mess of our model. "Fine," I said, blushing slightly.

"Hmm." He leaned over and cleared the screen, resetting the problem. "It looks like you're having some trouble. Give it another shot, and this time consider the derivative regression – "

"Of the mainline variable, yes," Zayek finished, impatient with Drayton's drawl. Mathematics had never really interested him, but at that moment, in the middle of that conversation, he cared less than usual. The instructor nodded, a little taken aback at his abruptness. As he walked away, Zayek leaned toward me and said, just loud enough to be heard over the beeping of tutor consoles all around us, "We're going to spend a lifetime learning the things we should have known all along."

"Like stupid modeling programs." The equation blinked on the screen. "But – Zayek, it's going to be inconvenient and hard, getting to know how people are supposed to be and how Federation citizens are supposed to live when they're not half frozen and too sad to breathe, but it doesn't seem like a reason to just - end it."

"It's not just inconvenient." The flat calm was back in his voice, but he tugged nervously at one of his dark curls. "It's just - clinging to survival in a harsh, hopeless environment makes generous, innovative people desperate and afraid. I think that we won't recover, and we'll never belong here." He took a deep breath, leaning still closer; he stared at the console, but I stared at his angular profile. "Still, I want to live. I don't want to lose the little I have, either, Bea."

I swallowed, hard; he knew me too well. Even knowing that those who had raised me were shadows of themselves, I still didn't want to give any of them up. "Then why haven't you thrown it away?"

"If it were just our lives, you, me, our parents, all the survivors – if it were just us, I might." He took a steadying breath. "It's a core tenet of Vulcan philosophy, Bea, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. But I believe it is universal to all civilizations, really: individuals sacrifice themselves and their personal interests for the benefit of the larger population." He looked up at me, begging me to agree.

"Mathematics, not philosophy, you two." Drayton was back, and annoyingly cheerful. "Now, you still seem to be having trouble."

I looked from Zayek to Drayton to the screen; we hadn't gotten past the initial problem. "Sorry, sir," I said, busying myself the keys. With a phenomenal burst of color, the tri-D grid twisted into a new, and still totally wrong, jumble of lines.

"I know you two have some experience with theoretical math, but maybe statistical calculus was the wrong starting place. It can be pretty tough to wrap your head around," he said. "Maybe something a little easier – "

"Actually, sir, we know the answer." Unlike Zayek, I liked mathematics, and I didn't want to be the target of the instructor's well-meaning condescension. "We just can't the model to reflect it. We've never worked with computers before."

A smile played around Drayton's lips; he didn't believe us. "It's not easy to solve this type of problem without a model, Beatrice, though there are several related fields you might be used to working in. Why don't you give it another shot?"

I reset the problem one more time as he walked away, but I let my hands just rest on the panel. Finally, I said softly, "But who are the many, Zayek? There's a whole universe that would be affected, and we can't know which course of action best serves their interests." I forced myself to think about it logically, impartially; it was just another scenario in Tuvok's Starfleet policy class, another complex equation to be balanced before my mother would let us go.

"That's a simplistic argument, because on a universal scale there is no 'greater good,'" Zayek responded, carefully. "It cannot be quantified. What benefits one world may mean destruction to the next, and most effects are far less dramatic and far more difficult to classify. I think we must only consider those things we can directly assess – namely, the lives of the Voyager crew. The rest is beyond our understanding and control, and there is nothing we can do to change that."

"Well, we can leave it alone," I retorted. I was overwhelmed by the scale of the universe and the impossible number of variables involved, and I suddenly felt very tired.

"We can't," he said, a little too loudly. Several other children looked around at us and smothered giggles. "We can't," he repeated, in a low voice. "Whatever we do, we will be choosing. The power is in our hands, and we change history by action or inaction."

"There is no passive course," I murmured. He nodded mutely, staring unseeingly at the display. "But – do we have the right?"

"No," he said immediately. I turned to look at him, surprised. "Not at all. But that we are even having this conversation suggests that it is as much our decision as anyone's. It wasn't Harry or Chakotay's decision, either, but they were prepared to make it. The decision to destroy the array was not really your mother's to make, but it fell to her. Perhaps having the 'right' to decide is really only a question of being the person who is forced to do it."

"Stop being so logical." His face was inches from my own, and I dropped my voice still further. "These are our lives, Zayek,"

"I know that," he said, and anyone who hadn't know him so long would never have heard the quaver in his voice. "There are very good reasons, emotionally, to do or not do it. We want to live; we want those we love to not suffer. Those should be the same goal, but here they are opposed: we only live in this timeline, and that one is where their happiness lies. I don't think the two can be reconciled." He exhaled heavily. "Logic is all I have, Bea."

"What does logic say, then?"

"To do it." His answer was immediate, his certainty damning. It seemed out of place in that bright room, full of the laughter of children who'd never been faced with hunger, let alone a decision so difficult. "It's simple: our lives for theirs. The five of us for 126 crewmen, and happiness of the thirteen survivors." He rocked a little on his chair, the magnitude of what he was saying sinking in. In his tone I heard a hint of desperation. "We're Voyager's crew, Bea, aren't we? Don't we save them?"

I thought about that; most of the crewmen had never known me, but I knew them better than anyone except my mother. Their blankets had kept me warm, their books had taught me, and their stories had sustained all of us. Didn't I owe them, after they'd done so much for me? Were their lives worth mine?

"How's it coming?"

Both Zayek and I recoiled. Drayton still had that smile on his face, and we still hadn't solved the problem. Before he could recommend that we downgrade to basic algebra, Zayek sketched a probability model in the air. "The chart should trend toward infinity where z is greater than the sum of x and y for all t," he said, gesturing back at the initial equation set. "There's a fundamental instability in all other regions, except where the independent variable is zero." He ran his hands over the imaginary statistical curves again. "We told you. We've never worked with computers before, but we know the answer."

"The solution set is a system of seven equations," I added. "The first is the simplest – it relates x and t by the z-dependent product of the initial regression mode. Do you want me to recite the others?"

Drayton raised his eyebrows. "You guys like math?"

"Not really," Zayek said, shrugging. He watched as Drayton crossed the room to consult with one of the other instructors, then looked back at me, steady as always. My best friend, able to visualize regression models while logic chipped away at his right to live; I couldn't tell whether the twist in my stomach was laughter or sorrow. "So?" he asked me, and I knew what my answer had to be.

"We don't have the right," I said, resting my gaze on the endless stars outside the window. "You said it: not at all. But maybe we have the responsibility."

It's surprisingly easy to focus on the means to an end, without thinking too hard about what that end is. People have done it throughout history. Nobel invented dynamite, Feynman helped develop nuclear missiles during the Second Terran World War, Renok of Vulcan created phased laser weaponry, and Starfleet's own Lyster only adapted that technology to hand-held phasers because a colleague bet her that she couldn't. Their devastating effects paled beside the challenges of splitting the atom or phasing light in a chamber the size of a baby's toe – and what scientist could resist a problem like that?

Sending a message to the past might have been ethically questionable and emotionally complex, but it was still the best puzzle we'd ever solved. The transceiver was decades more advanced than Voyager's Borg technology, and it took us a while to sort through the relays and connections. What we needed was a simple operating system that would serve as a bridge between Starfleet software and Borg hardware, something to tell the computer what message to send, and when. To kids who had only ever worked with flickering oxygen production systems and the isolated circuitry of gel packs, the depth and complexity of the programming language was unimaginable, but with Zayek's determined research through the Challenger's database and the fact that the Borg spoke in the kind of complex mathematics I'd never been able to resist, we persevered.

It took us nearly nine hours to write the program. We left the schoolroom at 1300 hours, the instructor's murmured injunction to Tom about our "potential, despite an extremely uneven education" still ringing in our ears. The rest of the adults were still in debriefing; from the sound of things, the admirals' main concern was that they understand the party line upon their return to Earth. Tom, distracted by their attitude and worried about Miral, who didn't seem to be adapting well to the change in temperature, took Harry and Ada with him to his quarters but let Zayek and I return to my mother's, where we got started right away.

Holed up in my room, dozens of PADDs scattered across the bed, we lost ourselves in the challenge, and several times we despaired: it just didn't seem possible. More than once, I berated Zayek for not taking any of Harry's research with him from the lab, too. When we finally hooked it up to a display console, though, our translation program did exactly what we needed it to: it asked where, when, and what. We both stared at the blinking cursor on the little screen, in disbelief: could it really be so easy?

Zayek let out his breath noisily. "Seven of Nine's cortical index, the necessary time index, and… the correction."

"That might be a problem," I said, slowly. "The cortical stamp we can get, I think, from the undamaged portions of Voyager's computer core; LaForge ordered them uploaded, and the serial number should be included in Seven's medical records. Or it'll be on some transporter log somewhere." He nodded, and I continued. "The time index is just a little before the one that Beth calculated, and you and I know that one." Beth had spent years working to arrive at that number, along with the probable coordinates of the planet: I wasn't likely to forget it.

"And the correction?"

I drummed my fingers on the floor. "That's the problem," I said. "Borg technology, sure, but what do you know about slipstream maintenance? None of that's going to be on the salvaged database. Engineering was too heavily damaged."

"I know how the drive worked," he pointed out. "B'Elanna made sure of that."

"True." I was sure that if we asked, B'Elanna or Joe or Maddie could tell me exactly the phase variance of the slipstream, and exactly what it should have been – I guessed that it was burned onto their memories. Enough time and research, and we could work out Harry's correction for ourselves. But I couldn't think of how to explain to any of them why I suddenly cared, not now that the wreckage of the core was no longer our constant companion. "But this could take weeks. Months, even."

"Well," Zayek said, bracingly, "The past will always be there, Bea."

"Yes, but – " I pushed myself to my feet, and started pacing around the small room. "We can't wait, Zayek. First of all, I'm going to lose my nerve, and what if sunshine is too wonderful to give up? And then, there's security – at some point, it's going to occur to them that the transceiver might be around, and there are scanners and sensors and transport filters – "

"Okay, okay." He stood up too, and began to tidy the PADDs scattered across the white quilt. "So we need a faster answer, or we need to give up."

I helped him pick up the PADDs, thinking furiously. As we disconnected the transceiver from the module and wrapped it in a pillowcase, I said slowly, "You know, we have those numbers memorized because Beth spent years on them. It wasn't even our research and we know it by heart."

Zayek slid the bundle under my bed; we agreed that the less we carried it, the better. "Yes," he said cautiously. My arms full of PADDs, I leaned toward him, but spun around when I heard the main door slide open.

"Beatrice?" my mother called. By the time I entered the living room she had kicked off her shoes and was distractedly pulling the pins from her hair. "Oh, good; you're here. Hello, Zayek."

"Hello," he said, evenly.

"Have you two eaten? I can't believe that we were in debriefing for thirteen hours," she said, glancing at the chronometer. "What have you been up to?"

"Oh, just… reading," I said, shrugging, my arms still full. "Lots to catch up on."

She picked the topmost PADD from the stack and raised her eyebrows. "Starfleet computer languages?" She scrolled through it before reaching for the next. "Advanced universal programming dialects? I would have thought you'd start with more… general knowledge."

"We had some trouble with the educational modeling systems today," I confessed. She laughed and dropped the two back on the pile. "Apparently, it's more important to know how to work a computer than solve the problem you're set without it."

"I heard about that from Tom," she said, an uneven smile on her face as she settled down onto the couch, shaking her hair out of its coil. "But you still solved the problem, right?"

"All nine of them," Zayek said flatly. "Statistical calculus, physical suprema, probability dynamics… without the computer."

She laughed. "Good to remind them that people were doing mathematics long before Federation educational standards came along," she said.

"I'm not sure that our instructor saw it that way," I said, dropping the PADDs into one chair and sitting on the arm. "How's the admiralty?"

She wrinkled her brow. "Talk about not seeing it that way," she said, sighing. "We spent hours verifying Kim and Chakotay's original reports, as well as all the Flyer's logs. They refused to believe that they might be telling the truth about anything that happened before the crash; apparently, treason makes everything you've ever said suspect." She leaned her head all the way back, staring upside down at the stars. "It's going to be an uphill battle, I think, getting any kind of fair treatment for them."

"What about us?" I asked.

"We spent another few hours convincing them that we didn't know anything about that blasted transceiver," she said, pulling her head up again, just missing the glance I flashed Zayek. "I think we proved our innocence, and we'll just have to sign confidentiality statements, swearing us to silence for a few months until the hullabaloo blows over. They'll probably send us quietly to our families, though, rather than keep us on a Starfleet compound somewhere. Locking us up would be a greater fuss than arranging transport for nine graying ex-officers and six young Federation citizens."

"We don't get a parade?"

"Voyager was Starfleet's lost lamb, from what I understand, and after the Dominion War, everyone wanted a mascot. When they had to give up the search – well, I can't imagine public opinion was very positive." I made to interrupt, but she held up a hand. "You heard Admiral Patterson, Bea: they're more afraid of negative press than anything else. A parade would just call attention to the fact that Starfleet gave up, and when it gets out that they abandoned the brave, breathing crew of Voyager to an icy grave – "

"I get it," I said, shaking my head. "So we wait."

"Yes," she said simply. We were quiet, for a moment, my mother melting into the couch, me perched on the arm of the chair, and Zayek standing, hands clasped behind his back. Finally, she turned toward him. "You should go, Zayek," she said, as though only just remembering that he was there. "Your mother will be wondering where you are, and we should all get some sleep. And there are things that you – that you need to discuss."

He nodded mutely; in the last few hours, excited by the orderly computer languages, he had been able to forget that his parents had only been drawn together through circumstance, and that now those circumstances had now changed. I sprang to my feet, and walked him to the door. "It's going to be okay," I said, trying to answer the plea hidden in his seriousness. I dropped my voice to a whisper and leaned into the corridor. "I don't think we have to recalculate it. I think - there's someone who should know."

His lips twitched, and he impulsively squeezed my hand before he turned away. I watched him go; he seemed so small, dodging between the crewmen as he ran toward Maddie's quarters. If I was right, we would have everything we needed to make sure Zayek was never born. The knowledge was impossible, almost nauseating: who would I be without him?

But he had said it: we were Voyager's crew, as much as she had one, and we owed something to the ship and those who served her. He disappeared around the corner, and I ducked back into the quarters, surprised at how calm I felt. I could already feel the gaping hole inside me that his absence would leave, even if I never knew him. I explored it: a dull ache, somewhere below my heart. If somehow I still existed on the other side of history, I couldn't imagine not missing him – but I would be able to live with the lack.

I stacked up the PADDs again and deposited them on my desk, nudging the lumpy pillowcase with the transceiver further under the bed with my toe. A tiny part of me still wanted to grind it under my heel, but the things I had to hold onto – my mother's fragmented, desperate love, Zayek's friendship, shot through with his guilt, an intimate familiarity with a crippled ship – seemed insufficient. No: my needs were not enough.

Instead, I walked over the replicator. I considered asking for coffee, but I settled on a mug of hot, unsweetened tea, not unlike the stuff that Joe used to brew. I held it out to her when I returned to the living room, and she wrapped her slender fingers against it. Together, we breathed in the steam. Somehow, the almost-familiar smell was as welcoming, as fortifying in the safety of our guest quarters as it had been in the frozen conference room.

"Thank you, Bea," she said, sipping the bitter tea. "That's exactly what I needed."