Author's note: I'm not dead yet! Work is keeping me extremely busy. So, here's another chapter which will answer a few questions. Enjoy.

"First things first," Paris told the ensign. "In order to defend you, I have to know your story. So I gotta ask you some questions. I need you to be honest with me. Anything you tell me is confidential, so you don't need to worry about me telling anybody. But I need answers."

Kessel nodded, still eying him a little warily.

"Straight answers. Complete answers," Tom persisted. Somehow, he thought Kessel might well split that hair if she had the chance.

There was still a distance between them; he could feel it. She didn't let her shields down easily. He found himself wondering if she ever had. Sort of like B'Elanna, he reflected, although B'Elanna included a healthy offense along with her defense. Silence reigned as they watched each other for a few moments.

"I'm trying to help you," he reminded her.

"I know," she said shortly.

"First," he said. "I gotta ask. Are you really a Eugenics War Augment?"

Kessel stiffened and broke eye contact, looking away. Her hands flexed and she bit her lip. She held her silence for three beats, then swallowed, gathered her courage, and answered the question she had obviously been avoiding most of her life.

"Yes," she said.

"How is it you're here, now, on Voyager?" he asked.

"Okay," Kessel said slowly. "The...the big question, nicht wahr?" She smiled humorlessly and stared for a moment at the door. He thought she might try to get up and bolt.

"Gesundheit," Paris said, trying to put her at some kind of ease. It got a tense, uneven smile, but hey, tense and uneven was better than nothing.

Kessel fidgeted for another few seconds, swallowed again, and took a breath. "Have you...have you ever heard of the Augment Crisis of 2154?"

Paris shrugged. "Probably a while ago. Refresh my puny non-enhanced memory, will you?"

That got another quick smile. "Dr. Arik Soong had taken Augment embryos and raised them to adulthood in the 2130's. He had been captured and put in prison. As adults, Soong's Augments hijacked a Klingon bird of prey. The Enterprise – the NX-01 Enterprise – was sent to go after them. Captain Archer took Soong into custody on his ship, but Soong escaped."

Tom thought. Yeah, he'd heard of this, but twenty-second-century history was not his specialty. Kessel had learned the story by heart, it seemed. "I heard something about that," he hedged. "Soong tried to attack some space station, didn't he?"

Kessel smiled coolly. "Soong did invade Cold Station 12 with his Augments, and stole fifteen hundred Augment embryos from cold storage in that facility." She gestured at herself. "I was one of those embryos."

Now he remembered a story B'Elanna had told him once: how it was some Klingons didn't have brow ridges and looked more human. "Wait...didn't the Klingons get those embryos? And they did something...oh, I forget what it was. But they messed up and erased their foreheads."

Kessel drew herself up and continued, still reminding him of an Academy history professor. Well, if she could give him answers via a history lecture, that was fine. "The Klingons did get the embryos. Captain Archer shot down the Augments' ship above a Klingon colony planet. Apparently, he didn't think we were worth saving. The ship crashed, and the Klingons retrieved some of us from the wreckage. They tried to make their own Augments, but it didn't work. One of their subjects had the Levodian flu, and our genes modified the virus. It caused them to become more human in appearance – without the distinctive Klingon forehead."

Jeez, she talks like an encyclopedia. Thank you, Frau Professor Kessel, Paris thought but decided not to say. If talking about it like a history lesson kept her talking, so much the better. "So you were there? On that ship?"

"Well, technically, yes," Kessel said, staring at him as if he was insane. "It's not like I remember it. I was an embryo. I was about a centimeter long and didn't have a brain yet."

"Well, yeah," he admitted. "Still...they had you for two hundred years?"

Kessel nodded. "The Klingons admitted to only having a few embryos, when the Augment virus came out," she explained. "Actually, they had a lot more – several hundred. They developed a quiet little eugenics program on a distant planet, far away from the centers of the Empire, and they tried a few more times over the years. They never tried to make Klingon Augments again – not after the virus – but they did try to bring several Augments to life. They thought we would make good spies. But they couldn't control the Augments. It usually ended badly."

For a moment he wondered what 'ended badly' might mean with Klingons on one side and guys like Khan Noonien Singh on the other. It probably involved a lot of fighting and bleeding. "Superior ability breeds superior ambition," Paris observed.

Kessel shook her head. "Pfui. That's a canard that Starfleet uses to justify discriminating against us. I never put Ceti eels in anyone's ears or tried to take over the ship. No, Lieutenant – the reason the Eugenics Wars broke out and the reason the Klingons could never control the Augments were one and the same – defective genes. Genes that control the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. The older Augments couldn't help their behavior. Their brains didn't work right."

Paris leaned forward, interested. "Really?"

"Yes," Kessel said. "I can show you a genetic map if you want." She gave him another tense smile. "I know exactly where the defective base-pairs are and how to repair them."

Paris shook his head and chuckled. "That's okay, I'll take your word for it. Keep going."

Kessel took a breath and continued. "Once the Klingons allied with the Federation, the interest in us died down. There were forty-eight Augment embryos left – one of them myself. We were in a freezer on that planet in a Klingon biological research laboratory, and we were left there for years. Over a century, actually."

"What happened?" Paris asked.

"One man's ethics, that's what," Kessel said. "One man's ethics, but that's all it took. I told Captain Janeway ethics was the only reason I'm on this ship today. That's true. One Klingon biologist named K'Voch took a look at us. He saw that cells were breaking down...dying. K'Voch realized that we couldn't remain frozen any longer. The embryos that we came from had been frozen for a few centuries. It turns out you can't freeze embryos for that long. There were two choices: either bring the embryos to life, or let them die. K'Voch was a moral man – an ethical man. He saw no honor in letting helpless embryos die. That left him only one choice. "

"Which was what?" Paris said, leaning forward.

"Obviously, he couldn't bring us to life himself," Kessel said. "Can you imagine? There would be no way to hide forty-eight human children for a Klingon. What he did was contact a human biologist in the Federation whom he knew. Another man who respected life, and respected it enough to think it should be extended even to us."

Paris leaned forward. This was interesting. He knew some things about Klingons, by dint of his relationship with B'Elanna, but he hadn't ever really thought of one taking a moral stance. Klingon morals were more along the idea of 'smash things with really shiny bat'leths', from his cursory knowledge of them.

"Who was that?" he prompted.

Kessel stopped and her mouth twitched. "Dr. Heinrich Kessel," she said unwillingly.

"Your dad?" he asked.

"Yes," Kessel agreed. "That's part of what bothers me. I don't want him to get in trouble. He's seventy and he's in a mobility chair. I don't want him going to prison."

Paris shrugged. "He's not part of this hearing, Kessel," he said. "We'll do what we can. So what did your dad do?"

"K'Voch reported us destroyed, and passed us off to my father at a scientific conference," Kessel said. "My father read Soong's work. Even two hundred years ago, Arik Soong knew about the defective neurotransmitter genes. My father's pretty well known in the field, and he arrived at the same conclusion. So he repaired us – a simple matter with modern technology. That's why we don't have the same violent and erratic behavior." She gave him a sudden imploring look. "Really. We're no harm to anyone. We just want a place in society."

"I know," he said. "That's the idea, Kessel." Then he thought for a moment and what she'd said before going off on her little tangent registered. "Wait a minute...your dad raised forty-eight Augments?"

"Oh nein," Kessel said, looking surprised. "No, not at all. Can you imagine forty-eight Augment toddlers? It would have been chaos. According to my parents, I was enough of a handful. No. My father found others who felt as he did."

"Others who felt...what, exactly? That eugenics deserved another go?" Paris asked. Could that be possible? After all, hadn't it been the scientists of the twentieth century who had made the first Augments? Dumb ideas had a habit of coming around again. Up until now, he hadn't been up to speed on Federation law about the genetically enhanced, but he doubted that bringing Augments back was legal.

Kessel shook her head and looked irritated. "Others who felt that to let us die for the crimes of our predecessors was morally indefensible. Others who felt that all innocent life is sacrosanct, including Augment embryos. Others who felt that a civilization that does not protect innocent life doesn't deserve to be called a civilization. Others who felt that we just might have something to offer the universe."

He sensed real anger from her, and withdrew a little. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean...to upset you."

She pulled back a little and eyed him warily. "It's all right," she said. "You've been taught all your life that Augments were capable of nothing but evil."

That was a good way to put it, he thought. He'd have to use that somehow. Augments weren't all evil. Even so, he had a job to do. "Okay...nobody noticed this little project of your dad's? I mean, didn't he need scientific equipment and artificial wombs and stuff to pull this off?"

She shook her head and studied him from those green eyes. Her eyes were pretty, he thought. You had to look at her to notice them. She'd made quite an art form out of deflecting attention and evading the spotlight. "No," she said. "All the families that took us in were married couples. We were implanted naturally and gestated quite normally."

He stopped, trying to figure out what she was talking about. "Implanted? I'm missing something here...,"

Kessel shrugged. "Oh," she said. "I thought you'd know from being a field medic, Lieutenant Paris. Implanting an embryo in a uterus is a very simple procedure. Back in the twentieth century, it was an iffier proposition – but with modern medicine, implantation is almost a guaranteed success."

"Oh," Paris said, and flushed. "That was...a little more than I needed to know."

"It's just biology," Kessel said, and seemed miffed. "Your wife is pregnant. I thought you'd have studied up on the subject. And you said you wanted straight and complete answers."

"Yeah," Paris said, "but I didn't...," he shook his head. Kessel might not have messed-up neurotransmitter levels the way prior Augments did, but he didn't think her brain worked quite like other people's either. She was cute, but she didn't seem to understand social behavior much better than Mortimer Harren, Voyager's other maladjusted scientist in residence. "Well, yeah, actually, I did say that," Paris admitted. "Don't worry about it. So then what?"

Kessel shrugged. "I was born, and raised by my parents," she said. "Nothing too dramatic, really. No tragedy or angst. My parents were older, I was an only child, and they doted on me. Vati is a biologist, Mutti is a chemist. They're both full professors at die Freie Universität Berlin." She stopped. "Er. Sorry. Free University of Berlin."

Paris shrugged. "I got the idea," he said. "Go on."

"Not much to tell, really. I had everything I could want. I grew up around the university – a faculty brat. I did well in school, I was able to take university classes when I was very young, and I continued with that until I went to Starfleet Academy."

"And nobody ever tipped to realized what you were?" he asked. "Even growing up right on Earth?"

She shook her head. "People expected I would be intelligent. My parents were. I was in the gifted and talented classes in school. Everybody there was highly intelligent. I doubt I was the only genetically enhanced one, either."

"Yeah, but you were taking university classes as a kid," Paris pointed out. "That didn't make anybody look twice at you?"

Kessel chuckled. "You're thinking that's because I was an Augment. Actually, it was because I was a faculty brat. A lot of professor's children did it. Parents pull strings for their children."

Not all of them, Paris thought, and thought of his father. "Now, when you went to Starfleet Academy," he said, trying to make it sound casual, "how did you get out of being bioscanned?"

Kessel tensed and held her tongue for a long moment.

"Remember, everything you tell me is confidential," he reminded her.

She remained silent for another few moments. "I, uhhh...I didn't," she said. "I...," She got up and strode over to her bureau, rummaging through a drawer. A moment later she came back with a medical tricorder in one hand and a small object he didn't recognize in the other. It was curved and had a few small buttons on it, along with a tiny screen that looked to be about the size of that of a twentieth-century calculator.

"What is that?" he asked.

Kessel's mouth quirked. "It's a sensor spoofer," she said, and gave him the medical tricorder. "Here. Scan me."

He took the probe and waved it in front of her. The readings that came up would have made anyone look twice. Her heart rate was forty beats a minute, her blood oxygen levels were higher, her lung efficiency a good chunk higher than it should have been. Anyone waving this thing around would have known that she wasn't what she appeared to be. After a moment, the genetic scan began. The helix that appeared didn't look like anything he'd ever seen before. It looked like somebody had hacked up her DNA with the genetic engineering equivalent of a hacksaw and then tried to glue it back together. He didn't think some of the added sequences were even human in origin. Then there were other sequences that were clearly done with a more sophisticated hand.

Kessel smiled bitterly. "Twentieth century techniques were rather crude," she commented drily. She tapped one of the buttons on her curvy thing. The screen came to life with alphanumeric characters. "Now scan me again."

He complied, and the results that scrolled up his screen were markedly different, indicating that Erika Kessel was a completely normal human being. Heart rate, lung efficiency, blood oxygen levels – anything he scanned came up as completely normal. The DNA that came up now was that of a completely human woman who did not appear to have been genetically enhanced in any way.

"Your little toy there did all that?" he asked.

She nodded. "Medical tricorders haven't changed much in the past several years," she explained. "You think it always gives you the truth, but it doesn't. It's just a device. If you know how the device works, you can build another device to fool it. It's not very difficult, really. Many engineers could do it. Most doctors could; they're expected to know how a tricorder works."

Paris paused. This was going to complicate things a little bit. Neglecting to tell her superiors that she was genetically enhanced was one thing; actively using her little doodad to jam the tricorder was another. Still, he'd think of something. She only did it because of Starfleet's rule against the genetically enhanced, the whole idea of Starfleet is that your DNA doesn't matter, just what you do, we have to take the whole situation in perspective...

Stick to the job, Tom. Get her story so you can tell it. "Did you design that yourself?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I had a lot of help," she said. "Vati and I worked out the DNA sequence that could pass for my own. It took a few months. The head of the Microtechnology Department at the university actually built it for me."

He raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like you had quite the conspiracy behind you," he quipped.

Kessel stiffened again. "Conspiracy...if you like. These were people who believed we should have the same choices in life as anyone else."

He decided to get off the subject, even though the idea fascinated him. All these people doing all this...just out of conscience? It seemed almost suspicious; it was hard to believe that a group of people would raise a bunch of Augment children as their own, providing them with tools to blend into society, just because they believed it was the right thing to do. It struck him as like the Maquis – well, the other Maquis. He'd signed up mostly to fight and fly and drink. Others had fought for principles.

He held his hand out. "Let me see your gadget there," he said. She handed it over obediently. He stared at it for a moment before realizing he couldn't make heads or tails out of the alphanumeric characters flashing across the screen. Whoever had made it had known what they were doing; they'd packed a lot of circuitry into a very small, thin unit. What could B'Elanna make out of it? He'd have to see.

"Why didn't you have this on the away mission?" he asked.

Kessel shrugged. "I didn't want it to interfere with my sensor readings. I was in the shuttle manning the scanners. I thought it would be safe to go without it."

"Why is it curved like that?" he continued.

She stopped and grinned impishly and chuckled before answering.

"What?" he asked.

Kessel appeared to take great pleasure in explaining it. "It's curved, Lieutenant Paris, because it's supposed to fit in my bra, where doctors would be more likely to try to avoid it during a routine physical."

A bolt of ice struck him and he handed the device back to her tweezed between two fingers. "Oh," he said shortly. "Don't tell me where the male version fits."

"All right," Kessel said agreeably, still grinning at his discomfiture.

"Let's get back on track," Paris said. "How many other Augments are there?"

She cocked an eyebrow at him as if the question was dumb. "Forty-seven," she said. "I told you that."

Paris didn't feel like arguing the point. She might well have told him, but he didn't enjoy a genetically enhanced memory. "All your age?"

"All my age," Kessel agreed.

"How many of them are in Starfleet?" he asked.

Kessel froze, clenching her hands. "Do I have to answer that?" she responded.

Paris shrugged. "Do me a favor, Kessel...belay the paranoia, all right? I'm trying to help you."

She paused. "I'm sorry," she said, looking down at her feet. "I just....ach.," she studied hm for several long moments as if sizing up his trustworthiness. "Thirty-four. All of us in the same year."

"You all went to the Academy at the same time?" he asked, dumbfounded. Boy, too bad he hadn't known. Someone who bet on Starfleet Academy's sports teams that year would've made a killing with a bunch of genetically enhanced cadets on the team.

Kessel looked at him oddly. "We were all born within a month of each other," she explained. "Of course we'd be in the same year. We didn't all know each other, though. We were scattered throughout the Federation. Some of us were raised on Earth, others on colony planets. " She chuckled. "Your friend Ensign Kim didn't know it, but most of the people in his dorm floor were Augments."

He tilted his head. "Harry?"

Kessel nodded.

"Harry was valedictorian of his class," Paris said. "You mean he beat out a bunch of Augments?"

Kessel smiled and seemed to relax a bit. "Not bad for a puny human," she quipped. "I learned very early that it wasn't always the smartest move to show off everything I'm capable of doing. Most of us did. A little circumspection buys a lot of peace."

Paris chuckled. "You think you might be able to get that idea across to Seven of Nine? Might do her a world of good."

Kessel winced. "I doubt it. I rarely talk to her."

It was interesting to watch, he noticed. She had stiffened and pulled away when he mentioned Seven. Her dislike of the Borg drone was glaringly obvious. How come? They were similar in a lot of ways.

"Do you not like her, or something?" he asked.

She exhaled. "She's allowed to run around the ship, do whatever she wants, ignore regulations, and Captain Janeway lets her get away with anything," she said. "I could do some of the things she does. I, uh...I could offer a lot more to this ship than I have. It's just...I...,"

Paris nodded. That was exactly it, and that was why Captain Janeway was cracking down on the Augment ensign. It wasn't so much Starfleet law, although the law did say Augments need not apply. Captain Janeway could be convinced to ignore that. No,the captain's ire against Kessel was because she had spent the time in the Delta Quadrant hiding back, keeping her talents to herself. Defending her on that was going to take some work. It wasn't something the captain would forgive easily.

Better to take that bull by the horns. "Why didn't you?" he said.

Kessel squirmed uncomfortably. "Why didn't I what?"

Paris exhaled slowly. "Why didn't you offer everything you could to Voyager? You know the question will come up in the hearing."

The woman pulled back. Her face pinched into a miserable expression. "Everything? You don't understand...," Her eyes swept his face, searching for some sort of understanding. Paris watched, suddenly reminded of himself after his first and last Maquis mission. That was the look of new fish freshly arrested: groping for their new place in life, desperately seeking some sort of acknowledgement from their new guards.

"So, make me understand," Paris said. "Explain it to me."

"What was I supposed to do?" she burst out. "'Oh, Captain Janeway, I wanted to let you know, I can lug photon torpedoes around by myself, and I can usually figure out what Lieutenant Torres is doing if I just stand and watch her for a few minutes even though I'm not an engineer, and oh, did I mention my big sister was one of Khan's followers and tried to help him take over the Enterprise? Just think about it when you're making up the crew assignments.'"

Her face had flushed red, and her hands shook. Her voice had risen to almost a scream. She stopped, swallowed, and took a moment to compose herself. Paris knew that score: she knew damn well she'd been laying back in the tall grass and wasn't proud of it.

"Part of me did want to tell her," she said in a thin and watery tone. She seemed spent and defeated, staring down at the table rather than making eye contact. "I tried to get up the courage. But I never could. What if she didn't take my side? In the Alpha Quadrant, I'd get kicked out of Starfleet, but that would be the worst of it. Here, it's different...we're so far from home. Without a Starfleet rank..." she shook her head. "I was afraid I'd end up waitressing in the mess hall for the next seventy years. Call me a coward. It was a risk I didn't want to take. Now I have to pay for it."

Paris nodded. "It's something we'll have to deal with," he said. "We've got some time. I know your story, I'll come up with a way to defend you, and I'll help get you through this.. Don't talk about your case with anybody else, except me. Don't tell anyone else what we talk about."

"All right," she said weakly.

His combadge buzzed. B'Elanna's voice came from it, sounding frail and tired. "Torres to Paris."

He smiled, feeling guilty somehow. "Um, do you mind if I take this?"

Kessel shook her head. He tapped his combadge. "Go ahead," he said.

"Where are you? I woke up and you weren't here."

He flushed, feeling caught between his responsibility to his wife and the responsibility he'd just taken on. "I'm, uh, I'm on deck ten. I'll be right there." He stood up, offering Kessel an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry. It's just...,"

Kessel shrugged. "It's all right," she said. "Go to your wife."

"Thanks. I'll see you later. Keep your chin up. It's going to be okay." The platitudes tasted stale in his mouth, but he felt like he had to say something. For a moment he remembered his own defense counsel at his own trial. At the time, he'd thought his defense counsel to be happy and bouncy to the point of stupidity. Now, he had a little more perspective. His defense counsel had been trying to keep up his spirits, and now he saw why, quite clearly.

As he headed down to sickbay to visit his wife, he tried to mull this over. He'd thought this was going to be a slam dunk. All he would have had to do was point out the Federation's policy of tolerance, inclusion, and nondiscrimination, and that would have been it. Now he wasn't so sure. He still might win, but it wasn't going to be easy.

Even so, he found himself thinking about Kessel's story. The Klingon biologist, her father, those other families who had taken in the Augment embryos to raise as their own children – all of them had taken no small risk. They probably would have faced criminal charges if they'd been caught. He didn't know what punishment the Klingon Empire might mete out for the Klingon biologist who had stolen the embryos in the first place, but Klingons weren't noted for their forgiving ways.

People like that reminded him that the journey of his rehabilitation wasn't quite done yet. This was a start, though. It fell to some to fight for their homes. It fell to others to take in and shelter the last refugees of the Eugenics Wars. It fell to him to challenge the ban on Augments – the last Starfleet ban of its type.

Now, all he had to do was figure out just how he was going to do it.