Winter's Child, continued.
It should have been easier, the second night, to sleep on a living, humming ship, but it wasn't; the warp core was just as persistent, the stars still so bright. Worse, the transponder under my bed worried and distracted me, until it was all that I could do to not drag it out and recheck all our calculations.
When I padded barefoot into my mother's room, she was reading in bed, the lights low, one hand behind her head. She didn't say anything as I crawled across the bed, just pushed down the blankets absently and shifted as I slid in beside her. After a few moments, she held the PADD at arms' length and read aloud: "I am often asked whether we were lovers, Kathryn and I. It would be a good story, certainly, the whirlwind romance between the terrorist and the straight-laced Starfleet captain, but the truth is much more complex, as truths tend to be. I can only say that I trusted her, that I admired her, that I never tired of her company, and that I would gladly have followed her to hell. If that is love, and I think it is, then I loved her."
She sighed, and laid the PADD down. "Chakotay's Notes," she explained. "He mentions the whole crew, various missions, several bizarre cultures we stumbled upon, but the whole book seems to be about me, Bea."
I shrugged, staring up at the ceiling. It seemed simple enough to me. "He loved you." I didn't say that I had read the same passage, searching for a hint of myself, the unlikely gamble of their last night, and found nothing.
"He did," she said, softly. "I just wish that I had realized how deeply. Or that my career would end on an icy rock, and all those protocols wouldn't matter worth a damn in the end." There was a note of rueful desperation in her tone, a frustrated resignation that I thought Chakotay's beloved captain never would have admitted. She snuggled down beside me, ordering the computer to dim the lights and pressed her cold feet against mine. It seemed cruel, that she should have to hear those words secondhand, in memoirs written for a dead woman. She sighed again, and idly ran a finger over my hair. "But I'm not sure it would have changed anything, really. I would probably still be as hardheaded. And what's past is past." I thought again of the pillowcase under my bed: sometimes, the past wasn't past, at all. Provided, of course, that Harry Kim was the kind of man I thought he was.
"Stay warm," she murmured, and I bit back a retort about her icy toes.
"We want to talk to Harry Kim."
The officer in front of the door was grim in his dark uniform, and determined to be unhelpful; this was not the picture that Tom and Joe had given me of Starfleet. "Sorry. My orders are to keep the conspirators isolated."
"Conspirators." Zayek shrugged and turned away; his uncertainty was gone, and under his calm I saw frustration. "Come on, Bea. This isn't going to work."
"No," I said, crossing my arms. "We just want to talk to Harry. All he's guilty of is trying to save us, and I don't see why he shouldn't have visitors."
"Look, I have my orders." The guard straightened in front of the door, and he seemed to grow a few centimeters as he returned to attention.
"You look," I snapped, trying to imagine the Kathryn Janeway that Chakotay had described. She started with me, staring down the Maquis cell leader standing with a rifle on her bridge, but she didn't flinch at the Kazon, the Borg, the Hirogen. A security guard wouldn't have fazed her. "He's in there because he's protecting us. You know about this 'conspiracy' plot? He could have gone through with it, but he decided to let us keep on living." I dropped my arms to my sides, and took a step towards him. "So we get to say thank you."
Though the Challenger wasn't the flagship, the security officer was clearly an intelligent, dedicated ensign who had probably been at the top of his class. Still, he was no match for 'Fleet refugees; he was only ten years older than I, and had likely grown up with the search for Voyager on the news nets and read Chakotay's Notes on an Extraordinary Voyage in grade school. Had he, like Commander Luta, studied my mother at the Academy? He hesitated, and I made the decision for him.
"Fifteen minutes," I said, grabbing Zayek's hand and pushing past the guard. He reached an arm out, as though to restrain us, but I had guessed right: in midair, he changed his mind and tapped the door panel instead, unlocking it.
"Fifteen minutes," he said, tersely. "I'm Ensign Bendala – contact me when you're done. And this never happened, understood?"
I nodded hastily. "Thank you," I said, ducking through the door, "We'll be – "
"Go," he hissed, tapping the panel again to close the door. Inside, there were no guards; apparently, force fields, half-meter walls, and an officer outside the door with a phaser rifle were considered enough protection. A quick glance around told me that there were no Jefferies tubes access doors: the walls were smooth, the floors uncarpeted and the deck plating unbroken. Before us, a wide, brightly-lit hallway stretched perhaps fifteen meters, with cells set on either side. Three of them had lit panels, indicating active force fields.
I took a deep breath, glancing at Zayek for reassurance before starting down the passage. Our footsteps rang on the decking, and for the first time I let myself worry: what if Harry couldn't remember the correction? When I had imagined this conversation, I hadn't thought about Chakotay and Tessa being in the same room, but it wasn't Harry in the first cell.
Chakotay hadn't moved, though he must have heard us; he probably assumed that we were particularly light-footed ensigns. I couldn't help but slow down as we passed his cell; he sat on the floor against the side wall, arms resting on his bent knees, eyes closed. He looked older than he had on the Flyer, his cropped hair grayer, and I contrasted his stillness with my mother's nervous pacing. It seemed that they would fit together seamlessly, her restless tension and his anxious calm. How many ways, I wondered, did they complement each other?
"Bea," Zayek murmured. Chakotay turned sharply at the word, and his eyes widened in surprise when he saw us.
"I can't ask you," I said sharply, before he could speak. I glanced down at the PADD in my hands, just to have something else to look at. In the next cell, Harry was already on his feet; across the aisle, Tessa watched, perched on the narrow bunk. I could hear Chakotay shifting behind us, pushing himself up and crossing to where he could look into the passage, but I resolutely looked ahead. "Harry?"
He stood still, for all the world like a cadet at parade rest. I wondered for a moment how long he had stayed in Starfleet and played the upstanding ensign before his loyalties to ship and crew had taken over. High treason or no, that Academy-trained precision was still second nature to him, but that military calm had come with a sense of duty that had etched deep lines in his face and, I imagined, cracks in his soul.
"We need your help," I said, softly, moving further from Chakotay's cell.
"How did you even get in here?" he asked, still guarded. I could feel Tessa's eyes boring into my back, and stepped a little closer to the force field.
"It doesn't matter," I said. "We only have a few minutes, but we need to ask you… what exactly were you going to send to Seven of Nine?"
"LaForge sent you, didn't he?" He crossed his arms across his chest. "Still haven't found the transceiver. How many times do I have to tell him I didn't touch it? It's still in the lab as far as I –"
"The captain didn't – " I began, but I stopped. "Harry. We know you didn't hide the transceiver, and LaForge doesn't seem to be the kind of captain who sends teenagers to do his dirty work. Our question is ours." I met his eyes. "Please. What was the correction?"
"Why?" Chakotay's voice was strong, and Zayek turned to look at him. I couldn't; it would have been too easy, to spend those fifteen minutes with my father, and equally easy for him to convince me without saying a word that gambling on this timeline was worth it.
"Harry, please," I pressed. Harry's dark eyes flicked from me toward the wall that hid Chakotay. Zayek shifted beside me. We had tried to come up with a good story, but there was no getting around the fact that talking our way past a guard to ask such a sensitive question of accused felons was more than scientific curiosity. In the end, we had decided to simply ask; they would guess why, but they wouldn't have to admit it.
I hadn't anticipated, though, the gravity in Chakotay's tone. "Why do you want it, Beatrice?" Gone was the sorrow-driven friend, the haunted lover; inches from the force field stood the Maquis captain, the Starfleet commander, a man with an iron core sheathed in velvet. I turned then, knowing that Harry wouldn't help until we had answered that question, and faced my father.
He stood taller, firmer; this was the man who had stood up to my mother, who had fought and challenged her, the man who had made his eventual support worth winning and his love worth returning. I straightened my shoulders, too, because I had in me not only that iron but the steel behind my mother's blue eyes. She wouldn't have backed down, not when she knew that her course was the right one.
"We're going to use it," I said evenly, hoping that only I heard the tremor in my voice.
He had suspected, of course; he wouldn't have confronted us otherwise. But his eyes widened when I said it. Had he thought that I would avoid the question, lie to him when asked directly? "I see," he said softly, firmly. "We can't let you do that, Beatrice."
"I think you can," I said, just as firmly.
"Circumstances – " he began, but I cut across him.
"Have changed, yes, you all keep saying that," I said. Zayek moved closer to me. "But I don't – we don't think they've changed enough." I heard Harry's sharp intake of breath, Tessa's footfalls as she crossed to the force field of her cell, too. "There were ten survivors. Ten people you thought you'd never see again, and then – Harry has a namesake, there's a nine-week-old baby, and you have a daughter. Erasing history now must feel like – like – "
"Compounding failure with betrayal," Zayek filled in, his voice hollow. "Hurting us even more than we've already been hurt by the crash."
"And that's why we can't," Harry said, and there was a note of pleading in his words. "It's my fault that the ship crashed. I couldn't ask you to – how was I supposed to take away what you had left?"
I turned to him, tearing myself from Chakotay's earth brown eyes. "What do we have, Harry? Really?"
The words echoed off the deck plating, but he didn't answer. Zayek took a step toward him, running a hand through his curls and tugging on an ear. "We have our lives," he said steadily. "That's what you're thinking. We're alive, and miraculously, there's new life, but for the last fifteen years we've been cold and hungry and alone, and that doesn't end because this ship has functioning environmental controls. How can I make you understand what it's been like for us?" He took a deep breath, drawing his thoughts from the the silent room, the warm, still air. "Naomi Wildman lost her mother when she was three. She's eighteen now, a grown-up orphan going to meet a father that she doesn't know, a staid, solemn adult who's never had the opportunity to fall in love. She has lost her childhood, and nothing will bring it back."
"Or – or Tuvok," I added, laying my hand on Zayek's shoulder as he stiffened. "He's been missing his wife and children, but he has to bring his betrayal to back to them. He doesn't get his vows back."
Harry looked down at that, and the air was thick with steadfast Tuvok's shame. "My mother," Zayek almost whispered, his eyes fixed on Harry's shadowed face, "was twenty-nine when she chose to have a child with a man who couldn't love her, because it was necessary. Forget the lieutenant in stellar cartography she hadn't finished mourning yet; she had to raise a son who never should have been born. There's nothing left of the life she should have lead."
I felt him trembling under my hand, and there was a moment of profound silence. "It's not going to work," Chakotay said finally. "We know it was hard for all of you, but we took that into account when we made our decision."
"You didn't make the decision," I retorted. "You abstained from it. All of you, just stepped back because you couldn't stomach giving up the friends you'd spent so many years missing and Miral's blue eyes were suddenly more important than the 126 bodies we left behind." His stillness was almost unbearable, and I began to pace up and down the hall. "And hard? What does that mean? Hard is supposed to mean – I don't know, learning to speak Klingon or fix a replicator. Not starving and freezing, growing up among the dead. That's not hard, it's – " I fumbled for a word, then remembered what my mother had said to Admiral Patterson. "It's hell."
"I understand that you're frustrated, Beatrice, but – "
"You understand?" I stopped in front the cell and put my hands on my hips. "What do you understand, Chakotay?" I pronounced his name as my mother had, precisely, each syllable perfectly formed. "Because here are a few things that I think you can't possibly understand." I took a steadying breath, and dropped my voice. "If little Harry were here, he'd tell you that his mother cried herself to sleep every night for fifteen years, not for her friends or her lost home but because she was cold. Did you ever see B'Elanna cry?"
Chakotay's shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly, and I pressed on. "Do you understand that Tom finally became the kind of man his father would be proud of?" I felt a twinge at the thought of Admiral Paris, probably just now rejoicing over his grandchildren, but if they helped us, the admiral would meet them all the sooner. "He's a pilot and a husband and a father, but he watched his ship freeze and his wife despair and held his children closer every hour to keep them warm. You can't change that by understanding it.
"Or my mother." I dropped my hands from my hips and stepped closer to him again. "You understand her, Chakotay, better than anyone. Imagine her, raising a child without a father, being a woman without a lover, captaining a dead ship. Back on Earth, with you in jail and her ship trapped under a glacier a quadrant away, she'll still be – she'll still be what she's become." I nervously tucked a strand of hair back, and Chakotay followed the motion. "It's not enough. Can't you see that?"
"I can't let you give up your lives – " he began again, sounding tired and sad but no less firm.
"And what about the dead?" Zayek demanded, his voice low and hard as ice. "You all feel responsible for them, but we've walked among them our whole lives. Could you live for fifteen years among ghosts, and then leave them there? Because I can't." He turned around slowly, finally meeting my eyes. "For them, and for my father, I would give up everything." He closed his eyes. "Everything," he repeated, giving equal weight to each syllable.
There was nothing to be said to that: if they had thought that we were asking for the correction in ignorance or naiveté, our measured response made that impossible. But our fifteen minutes were already passed, and neither of them volunteered the correction either. I looked between them, but Chakotay's expression was stubborn and sad, and Harry avoided my gaze.
"Okay," I said, my voice breathy and breaking in my own ears. I slipped the PADD into my pocket and turned toward the door. "Well. Thank you, for – bringing us back to the Federation, then, even if you won't help us to – to set things right."
"I'm sorry," Harry said, and I didn't turn around again, just imagined his head hanging, his gaunt face pale. "Please understand. I just can't."
I nodded: I did understand, but there was nothing I could say to his misguided caution and charity. Glancing one more time at Chakotay, I couldn't suppress a shudder of anger. How could he love my mother and subject her to the last fifteen years? And yet, his eyes were haunted, and I knew that underneath all his rationalizations, he simply couldn't bear to lose her again. I bit my lip, held my anger close for a moment, and then forgave him for his love.
"Wait."
Almost to the door, Zayek and I turned together. Tessa was standing by the force field, agitation in the bold lines of her face. "I don't know the correction, but – you don't need it," she said, quickly. She seemed to be forcing herself to keep her gaze steadily on us. "Not if you don't care about getting them home."
"What do you mean?" Zayek asked, reaching into my pocket for the PADD and stepping back toward the cells.
"It's simple," she said, crouching down so she was level with him. "To get Voyager to Earth, we had to keep the slipstream intact, and so we had to send the right phase correction. But if all you care about is keeping Voyager from crashing, you can just shut down the drive, and – "
"Collapsing the slipstream early enough will save their lives," Zayek finished. "Yes, I see."
"Tessa," Chakotay said, sharply.
She ignored him, leaning toward Zayek as he took notes. "They get thrown back into normal space, still in the Delta Quadrant, but in one piece. Now, I'm not an expert on warp field kinetics, but I do know that the shutdown mechanism for a drive like that one depends on adjusting the ship's hyperdimensional footprint to normal space. First, the deflector geometry needs to be reset – that's right."
I came up behind Zayek, looking down over his shoulder. Starting from the generic model we'd worked out for a quantum drive, they modified it to suit Voyager's hybrid systems. She might not have formally studied warp theory, but I guessed that Tessa had been surrounded by calculations and schematics for long enough that she wasn't as ignorant as she claimed. It only took a few minutes for her to guide Zayek through the mathematics, arriving at a string of numbers and symbols far shorter and simpler than the one we had imagined. Chakotay looked away, clearly frustrated and torn, but Harry just fixed Tessa and Zayek with an unreadable gaze, leaning on one arm against the wall.
Zayek held the PADD up to the force field and Tessa read over it, mumbling, "Okay – that will realign the deflector dish, which should – the benamite array will disengage – good – and then the Hammond assembly needs to emit the halcyon particles to cool the reaction – and then the slipstream should disperse." She looked up at Zayek. "Good work. The sequence is correct, and your syntax is flawless."
"Will it be gradual enough?" I asked. "You're sure the same thing won't happen again?"
"If it's early enough, this should cool the core and disperse the stream in a matter of milliseconds, rather than femtoseconds. It'll be enough to maintain structural integrity as the ship realigns with normal space." She pushed herself to her feet, then said, "But you'll have to send it to them after Harry's correction failed and they lost contact with the shuttle, or history will just repeat itself, except this time, there may be no survivors to clean up afterwards."
I nodded thoughtfully. After they lost contact, but before the core destabilized beyond recovery: a delicate balance. "Okay," I said. "And Tessa – thank you, for – I don't know, for understanding."
Though her face was in shadow, I thought I saw the trace of a smile in the half-light. "I was prepared to give up everything too, and gain nothing," she said, voice muted. She looked over my shoulder toward Chakotay. "I know why you would change history, and maybe even lose your life, for the happiness of someone you love."
I tucked the PADD away again. Chakotay had retreated to the bunk, and though he met my eyes in silent reproach said nothing. At the comm. panel by the door, Zayek had just reached up to call the ensign when Harry said, almost too quietly to be heard, "Send it three minutes and 48 seconds before the crash, okay?"
I looked back, but he had already disappeared from view. The door slid open and the guard gestured to us, glancing up and down the empty corridor. "Thank you," I called back. Bendala raised an eyebrow, but I just offered him a cool smile and said, "They gave us our lives back, Ensign."