February 3, 2387
Satellite 19, Galada IV
Miral sucked in her breath hard, pulling herself away from Captain Paris' arms with great effort and nagging regret. He was holding you because he looks at you and sees his daughter…but his daughter is dead. She had to remind herself that her loss was so long ago…16 years in her timeline. His wounds were fresh. Was she in any less pain? She doubted it. She had taken all Daniels' advice to heart, but she knew moving forward, this would be the most insurmountable task.
Did it matter? her voice echoed defiantly in her head. Daniels thought she would need to remain detached and objective. It made sense rationally. Starfleet posted families together whenever possible, with the understanding that their duty was paramount. His duty to the entire station and every soul on board had been the reason why her father had sacrificed himself. Her mother had resented that fact ever since.
What possible reason could there be for her to remain detached and clinical with him? She was here, first and foremost, because she was trying to reset the timeline—to save her father's life and the life of her best friend's mother. Allowing her emotions to lead in this situation seemed to help her cause, much more than hinder it. She feared it had more to do with what Daniels hadn't told her. The chance that more would be asked of her…choices she would need to make in real time that may have been difficult. She couldn't rationalize it, feeling herself buckle in resignation, as the emotions tumbled over into every crevasse inside her.
In the simplest way, her father had been completely emotionally compromised, and yet gave his life for everyone else. She couldn't fail to be the best of herself, when she thought of that for comparison. She would never give less than her all, most certainly not when it came to her family and the people she loved.
She continued to breathe, calming herself, seeing the confusion on his face even as he continued to stare in wonder. She had to explain…and quickly. His landing party couldn't be allowed to find them. It was too much, too difficult to involve anyone else. Daniels had given her explicit instructions, and the number and identity of people she was allowed to make contact with was limited. From her blotchy tricorder readings, she knew there were two other humans with him on this satellite. Who they were, she could only guess.
"I know there is a lot that I need to explain, but, please, for now, you have to trust me. The rest of your landing party can't know that I'm here…or who I am," she told him, pulling herself back to neutral. "Who else is with you?" she asked generically, merely looking for information.
He had to visibly shake himself to answer her. "Harry–Commander Kim and Doctor Conlin," he replied, wondering how much she knew of them, considering her version of reality was obviously different.
Of course Harry Kim, she thought suddenly to herself. She berated herself quietly for not expecting this. If her father had been serving on a starship again, she should have realized that Harry would have been there with him. He had been her father's best friend since the first day they met. The mention of Dr. Conlin's name caused more emotion to bubble to the surface. Her father had instilled loyalty among those he had served with. Of course, if given the opportunity, Dr. Conlin would have followed. They would both know exactly who she was, her appearance and age irrelevant.
She hadn't realized anything was visible on her face as those thoughts swirled, but she realized it when Captain Paris asked, "What?" with gentle concern.
The softness in his eyes when he looked at her completely upset her equilibrium. She let her guard down, unable to remain stoic. "I need to explain," she insisted, her voice breaking. "But…I…miss them. My versions of them anyway." She rose, pulling him up by his elbow as she stood. "We need to move." Suddenly crisp, all business again.
"I can't…I can't just…disappear," he insisted, standing still even as she urged him to move. "They won't leave without finding me."
"My shuttle is damaged. Four hours to repair…only two if we work together. We have to be able to do those repairs unhindered, even if that means stunning them," she told him.
"Stun them?" he asked incredulously. "No…no, no…that's…that's unacceptable. How do we explain that?" he continued.
"We won't explain anything. We won't be here," she rationalized.
"They'll think you kidnapped me. You really want a Federation starship gunning for you?" he asked, his pragmatism grounding the otherwise surreal moment.
"We will be somewhere they can't follow," she said cryptically. He stayed silent, waiting for more explanation that wasn't forthcoming.
Miral produced a small scanner, what looked like the handheld scanner for a medical tricorder. She ran it over her own head and then over his as well. "This will mask our biosignatures for about four hours," she explained. She saw the tight furrow of his brow at his confusion. Nothing like that existed, at least nothing he had ever heard of before. "For now, we need to locate them. If we can get back to the shuttle unnoticed, we can use the phaser on the shuttle to do it. Less obvious, less conspicuous."
Whatever explanation she had, he needed to hear it. There was no doubt in his mind that she was telling the truth. There was no other logical explanation for her appearance. He had to follow through with her requests, even stunning his crew, in order to get to the place where he could start to get answers from her.
She moved and he followed. He saw his own footprints on the ground as they made their way back to the crashed shuttle. But only his. Miral had tracked away in the opposite direction, and obviously from this evidence, he could see no one had yet circled back in their search. They moved quickly, arriving at the shuttle's coordinates without making contact with anyone.
She lifted the hatch and climbed in, ducking towards the front as she moved. Tom followed her in. She started working at the control panel. Tom saw her activate the phasers, modifying them to a wide stun dispersal pattern. "I'm reading their lifesigns," she said, breaking the silence only punctuated with the beeping of the buttons on her touchscreen. Her fingers continued to flutter over the board. "Firing phasers," she said stiffly as she pressed the button.
The gentle whine was just on the edge of his ability to hear. The shuttle vibrated slightly under their feet. He held his breath while she waited, studying the readout in front of her. "They're out. For now. We have to hurry," she said, darting towards the side compartment and pulling out her tool kit. He took the tool she handed him and got to work silently.
The work was just what he needed…a complicated distraction that focused his mind and stopped it from wandering through the unbelievable set of circumstances he now found himself living through. The deja vu, the bizarre familiarity made no sense to him, but he didn't question it. It was after a good stretch of time that he realized the situation was reminiscent of when he had worked with his wife. His daughter was an engineer, he realized with pride, and she had emulated her mother and her skillset. She thought the same way, approached problems the same way as her mother. It awed him when he pondered it.
"We can…uh…talk and work at the same time, can't we?" he asked her. "You can start explaining what this all means." His head was inside the open panel underneath the control board while she worked above him.
"I'm here on a mission. I was sent by a temporal agent from the 29th century," she started to explain. He jerked upright, almost banging his head against the console. He almost fell backwards, she noted, watching as the urgency lit up his face.
"The Battle of Procyon V in 2567," Tom replied, saying it slowly as he pulled it from his memory.
The shock seemed to ricochet from him and land on her. She was not expecting him to have such detail about the future, or any information at all. "How did you know that?" she asked quickly.
"Admiral Janeway," he answered briefly. His words ran together as he continued. "Starfleet knew about the sphere builders and the attack on the Starbase. That's why I was sent to this sector. To investigate. They're forcing that realm back into regular space."
She was thinking, her eyes darting back and forth. "The temporal agents in the 29th century weren't aware of all that Starfleet could possibly know," she told him, certain of that. Daniels had explained how hard it was to be so specific as they looked 700 years into the past from his vantage point. "What they are certain of is that the sphere builders orchestrated the attack on Starbase 47–"
He cut her off. "Because the fallout from that event somehow gives them the advantage in 2567. They defeat the Federation because of that explosion."
"Was Janeway contacted by a temporal agent?" she asked, surprised again at how detailed his knowledge was.
"She had intel. Intel that she shared with me…even though it was classified above my level," he explained.
She nodded, thinking it only made sense. Daniels sent her because he was looking for the same information. He had just a bit more intel, it seemed. He had explained more to her. She realized it had to have been because he had been sent to recruit her. He told her everything because of that.
She continued working, feeling the time passing as the work became urgent to complete. "They sent me…because they knew you would believe me. Everything you said is true. But I have more information. Timelines…diverge from a specific point in time. Multiverse, you know, all that. The Enterprise-D had an experience where the barriers between universes were breaking down." He nodded, fully versed in Starfleet history, even relatively recent history. "The sphere builders have technology that allows them to see different futures created by divergences in the timeline. They manipulate events in order to bring about the most desired outcomes."
"I…I read all of Archer's logs, even the parts that were classified. He knew that back then…that they could do that," Tom explained. He unconsciously followed her lead and started his work again, though angling himself so his head was out of the console so he could hear her.
"They used that technology to find that focal point…and caused the explosion. The Federation couldn't trace time once the timeline had been altered. That's why they needed my help. They can't trace what was changed…they only knew that it diverged from that point. In every timeline but this one…Tom Paris died in the explosion at Starbase 47 caused when the reactor destabilized after being hit with a graviton wave," she explained grimly.
"Your father…died?" he asked as the color drained from his face. His hands were once again idle.
She nodded, swallowing over a lump in her throat, even now, 16 years removed from the tragedy. She stayed turned away, not meeting his eyes, using the work as a distraction. "My mother…was headed to the reactor room. He told her to go find me. He went instead. He ejected the reactor into space…but he had to release it manually. He was exposed to vacuum…" Her voice trailed away, more detail impossible for her to explain.
B'Elanna's Klingon genes had allowed her to survive, where his human genes had not. It was perfectly logical. But the knowledge blasted him on the inside. Every hopeless thought, every screaming nightmare…he had been right all along. Had he not let her go…everything would have been different. Miral would have lived. B'Elanna wouldn't have been injured the way she was. Guilt, fresh and damning, choked him until he couldn't breathe.
He was murmuring under his breath, agonized words full of regret. Miral couldn't hear all of it, but she understood. "Captain," she muttered, trying to break his fugue.
"I should have gone…why did I let her go? Everything…everything would have been alright if I had just–"
"Stop!" she commanded, her voice shrill as she understood more of his pain. Her eyes were wide, fixed on his face, flaring with anger. "Is that what you think?" she accused. "That you made the mistake?"
"You survived…and so did she," he countered, as if that was so obvious it wasn't worth mentioning.
"Do you think that just because she survived, she was ok?" Miral accused. "She wasn't," she spat bitterly. "She never figured out how to live without you. How to…just be. She gave up. I didn't just lose my father. I lost my mother too. She blamed herself for all of it." She hadn't noticed until she stopped speaking that she had started to refer to him as if he were her father, like she was talking to the dead man. Did it matter? she asked herself again. She didn't think he cared, or even noticed the distinction.
She felt his eyes go through her. "I don't…" He didn't know what else to say.
"I joined Starfleet to get away from her and that life. Everyone that cared about her—Harry, Aaron, Captain Chakotay— everyone tried to help her…but it didn't matter. To this day, I still feel closer to Aaron than I do to my own mother. He was there for me. She never was. She couldn't be," Miral lamented.
At the mention of Aaron's name, his concentration wavered. "Who died? In the explosion in your reality?" Before she said one more thing, he had to know.
"You and my grandfather. Forty five others. T'Lassa and Dr. Conlin were both killed in a secondary explosion in the Infirmary. My brother," she added with a whisper.
"Aaron survived," he gushed in wonder.
She needed him to focus. "Whatever the sphere builders were looking to change, erase from history—it had to do with you and T'Lassa. There is no possible timeline that exists where you both survived. That's why I'm here. For you. I have to travel to the other reality where T'Lassa survived. We need to figure out what they changed so we can correct it for all time. If the Federation loses the Battle of Procyon V, we lose the Federation."
"The tachyon radiation…and the memory loss. Do you know what's causing that? Did Daniels tell you? Mention it at all?" he asked.
"The sphere builders have cloaking technology. They've had it for thousands of years. In the 200 years since Starfleet first encountered them, they've adapted the technology to cloak themselves…when they cross the barriers into possible time streams. If you detected high levels, residue…they were interacting with this realm. I know it," she explained.
"Aaron…died about three months after the explosion. Under highly suspicious circumstances. Something tripped an intruder alert and he accompanied the security team. He was…alone…when he died. But he was killed by some kind of energy discharge. The wounds in his chest were radiating with tachyons," Tom explained.
She had been continuing to work all along, but that made her stop. Tom watched her delicate brow ridges crinkle as she was deep in thought. "It sounds right. That they were there, interfering…and they killed him. But…he wasn't…he isn't…" She struggled for the words. She wanted to say "important" because that was how it had been explained to her. Her mother, her, Aaron, Admiral Paris and Dr. Conlin all were what Daniels considered unimportant–which meant not crucial to the sphere builders' plans. She hated that word, and couldn't say it that way. "He isn't part of the focal point. Whether he lived or died appeared to not affect their agenda. It doesn't make sense."
"You said T'Lassa was the key, right?" Tom queried.
"From everything I've learned, yes, she was," Miral told him.
"How did she die? In the other realities?" he asked, feeling a cold dread starting to creep under his skin as his suspicion grew.
"An explosion in the Infirmary from an overload, in every reality but this one," Miral explained.
Almost as if he was talking to himself, but loud enough for her to hear, he said, "So I went to the reactor instead of triaging patients. That made the difference in my reality. She wasn't inside the Infirmary."
"I don't understand," Miral countered, wondering why he was asking.
"They killed Aaron because she survived the explosion," he gasped in understanding.
"What?" she asked, completely befuddled.
Tom's eyes overflowed with sadness as he stopped working again and looked directly at her. "They were bonded," he said quietly. "She was in direct telepathic communication with him when he died."
Miral gasped out loud, groaning softly as if she was in pain. "Oh…that's…unbearably sad," she whispered. She thought of the man who had raised her best friend, who had been there for her whenever she had needed parental advice that was so lacking in her life. He was so serious…so cerebral. Her rational mind understood that he had been in love with T'Mira's mother. The intensity of it…the profundity of the bond was something she had never let herself fixate on for too long. It only added sadness to the situation.
"Why not just kill her…if that was their intention all along?" Tom asked, his anger flaring as he realized what had transpired.
"I don't know," she admitted. "But she was telepathic. There's a chance she might have been able to detect them."
"The memory loss?" he asked, almost dreading her conclusions about that.
"If there were tachyons involved, then they were manipulating things. I don't have enough specific information, but I do know that part of the manipulation of reality would be erasing memories associated with the outcomes they were trying to favor," she explained.
His dread amplified. "Then they're here, too, on my ship. The same thing started happening on the Yeager. We found a pod, like the one Archer found in 2153. Inside the anomaly."
Her eyes widened at the news. "Then we have to hurry. We're running out of time."
How ironic, she thought again. Traveling in time…and running out of it.
}LS{
Tom sat beside Miral as she piloted the shuttle that was in the process of traveling away from his ship. Her explanations had done little to temper his unease. Harry and John would wake up alone on the satellite. Miral had masked the ion signature of the shuttle, and the nucleonic particles had masked the lift off, but there was still concern that the Yeager would be in pursuit, the moment they realized their half-Klingon pilot had absconded with their captain.
What kept interrupting Tom's train of thought was watching Miral. An adult version of his daughter, an engineer and a pilot, looking just as he would have pictured she would have looked if she had been allowed to grow up. She flew the shuttle the way he did. The realization battered against his resolve. Her father had died when she was a young girl…but somehow he had either flown with her, allowed her to watch him fly enough that she had incorporated it into her very being. A skilled pilot and a brilliant engineer. The best of both of them, what she had always been destined to be.
What she could still become, if they could reverse all of the tragedies that had befallen them.
"Can I ask you something?" Miral asked softly, interrupting the heavy silence.
Tom looked up, searching her face for some clue as to what she could be asking. "Sure."
"My mother….in one of her better moods, once told me that she had tried once, before I was born, to erase all my Klingon DNA." The pain that flashed behind Miral's eyes proved to him she was being sarcastic about B'Elanna's mood. Why would that B'Elanna have told her that?
"In an argument?" he asked quickly.
She shook her head vigorously. "No, no, nothing like that. While she was...intoxicated. It seemed to make her very….upset, but she still said I should know."
He breathed silently for a while, searching for the right words to say. "It is true."
Her eyes narrowed, her lips flattening to a thin line. "Why?" she demanded.
Tom didn't look back up at her, afraid too much emotion would show on his face as he talked. "She was trying to protect you."
"Protect me? From being Klingon? That doesn't make any sense!" She was so like her mother when she was angry.
"How much of your mother's life did you know about? I know before she was eight, my daughter didn't have any idea. She was too little. But she must have told you--" he started.
"Not in any kind of coherent way. My grandfather, John, tried to tell me once, but--" she interjected.
"How much contact did you and your mother have with him?" Tom asked curiously. His contact with them had been rare, sporadic and unpredictable.
"Very little. He tried to contact us a lot, but she always put him off. Told him she didn't want his help. He was all she had left. Her mother died while Voyager was still in the Delta Quadrant."
He let the mixed emotions about John Torres flutter by, not wanting to enrage her any more than she already was. So instead, he started telling her the truth, beginning at the start of the tale.
"We had only been married a very short time. We knew we wanted to have children, but we were...surprised by how quickly your mother got pregnant. The Doctor on Voyager showed us a holographic projection of what you would look like. I didn't realize it at the time, but your mother thought that you being only one quarter Klingon would reduce the appearance of your forehead ridges. She started acting strangely after she knew that. I didn't know that was why. Hormones, etc….made things hard. We were fighting. She kicked me out of our quarters, if you can believe that," he added with a snicker.
He scoffed slightly, looking back up at Miral, who was watching him intently, enraptured as he spoke. "She ran a bunch of computer simulations about how much DNA needed to be removed before you would look human. Again, without telling me. She did come and ask me if I would agree to the procedure, trying to say it would be healthier without all those redundant organs or something. We had a huge fight. Only I didn't really know what we were fighting about, not then."
His gaze shifted out through the viewscreen towards the stars that zipped by in dazzling rainbows of light. "She eventually tampered with the Doctor's program to make it seem like removing the DNA was necessary or you wouldn't survive. Then locked herself in SickBay, overrode security, you name it. I had to get the Security Chief to break through."
He looked into her eyes. "I had never been that angry with her, ever, and never again after that. She lied to me, hid things from me…and…I didn't understand. Trying to talk to her was like pulling teeth. And what she was trying to explain didn't seem to make any sense. About a camping trip she had taken when she was little with her father and her human cousins. It took me a long time to realize. Something that I had always known about your mother, from almost when we first met. Something I had forgotten, until that story reminded me."
Miral tilted her head, waiting for his words in rapt attention. "She hated the Klingon half of herself, and spent her whole life running from it. Because she believed her father had left because he hated living with Klingons. She was afraid living with another Klingon female would make me leave. That the same thing that happened to her would happen to you."
They sat in silence. The strangeness of the scenario, talking to his daughter, an adult, would not leave him. But in a strange way, he knew she understood, and that at last, someone understood. That he wasn't alone in those feelings. He continued, as much to relieve his tension as to inform her of the rest. "That was the only time in all the time that I knew her I saw her cry. During that same conversation." Miral heard the admiration ring in his voice as he continued, "She was the strongest, bravest, most fearless woman I have ever known--and don't forget, Admiral Janeway is in that group, so you know how much that means. Here was this Klingon who had faced down the Borg almost by herself….weeping….because she feared that she would lose me. Me. It never made any sense to me."
"She married you. Chose to have children with you. What didn't make sense?" she challenged.
He shook his head bitterly. "I let her down...all the time. So many times, when we were on Voyager." His face reddened with shame. Miral knew some of what he spoke, but didn't want to know anything else.
"You never asked her why?" It was so wise, so pointed, it stilled his roiling thoughts.
He had never put what he answered her into words before, but the thoughts were there at the front of his mind. "No." He sighed. "I guess I was just so afraid, that if I knew, I'd find a way to screw it up, stop doing it, be so worried….I was always good at screwing things up."
"I know why." He looked up at her, startled. How could she know? She was only eight when her father died.
"When did that ever come up in conversation?" he asked.
"It never did, not exactly. But I knew. It's why I could eventually forgive her….for not being the mother that I needed." She swallowed, set her gaze on the stars ahead, afraid looking directly at him would be too much. "She didn't just lose her husband, someone she loved. That happens all the time. People lose. And they grieve. And they live. Eventually, they choose to live, however hard that may be. The way that Aaron did. My mother couldn't do that."
"The pain from losing someone, someone very close to you, never really goes away." His voice shook slightly, forcing her to focus on how much pain he himself lived through.
"But you--you lost what she lost, more than what she lost. And you chose to live. You captain a starship! You didn't give up. You found another life, however hard that was," she insisted.
His hands were shaking, and he balled them tightly into fists, as he tried to calm the pounding of his heart. He waited, breathing softly against his fists.
"But she lost so much more, once I realized the reason that you can't seem to fathom. You accepted her the way she was. You were the only one who ever accepted her the way she was," she told him passionately. The same way T'Mira had always accepted her.
He shook his head slowly, feeling that she had misled him. "She had friends, granted not many, but people who did. Peo--"
"No, she didn't," Miral interjected. "You are referring to Chakotay? Or Admiral Kim?"
"Chakotay was like a brother to her, you must have known that. I always thought she was closer to him than anyone else," Tom countered.
"He saved her life. That's why she joined the Maquis. Out of loyalty to him, not necessarily out of hatred for Cardassians, although she learned that later. It isn't that hard to find a reason to hate the Cardassians. But she always kept the Klingon part buried deep, so he wouldn't see. He didn't have any patience for her anger. He had enough of his own, at least before he was on Voyager."
The words rang true, and he marveled again at how extraordinary this young woman was.
"But you, you never tried to change her. You knew what it was like, to not like who you were. And to know that some things you can change about yourself, and some things you can't. The things that you can't, you have to live with. You never walked away, no matter how bad things got. And you never blamed anything on her Klingonness.
"You….you helped her. To accept her Klingon half. To live with it, and not be afraid," she said sharply, touching his arm, eager to interject information to his story that he seemed to not know. "She did tell me that. When I would try to talk to her about you--about my father, when I missed him. She told me that. That was why she loved you so much."
He winced as if in pain, turning his face downward, afraid she would see the slip in his composure. But her voice, soft and penetrating, cut through his facade all the same. "And you promised her you wouldn't leave. And you never did." She touched his hand, tapped her nail against the gold metal on his finger. "Even after she forgot who you were, forgot that she felt that way….forgot that you loved her." She had transferred her meaning, switching from speaking of her father, to speaking directly to him. What was the difference? She didn't know why she was bothering at this point.
"Miral…" he whispered.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you," she said gently.
"You didn't upset me, Miral. It's just….I knew she felt that way, she just never…." He swallowed hard, thinking as well of all the things he had never told her, that he should have, and had forever lost the chance. "I'm glad she told you that. That even if it was only that once, that you talked like that."
She grabbed his hand, clutched it tight. "She was never ashamed of being Klingon, not in all the time that I knew her. That's why I questioned what she said...I couldn't believe that she would have ever tried to do that. It was only later, that I realized what her life had been like...how much of a difference you made to her."
She stopped short, as Tom, still clutching her hand, brought her hand up to his mouth. His tears ran down over the back of her hand. "I'm not usually at a loss for words. But I…" He swallowed hard. "I'm glad to know that she was at peace with herself. At least for a little while."
When he looked up, he saw Miral's face, her composure slowly slipping. Her eyes had become red and filmy, a slow steady stream of tears coursing down her cheeks as she blinked her eyes. "I know….you're not….." She lost her words as she shuddered, crying. "I know you're not my father. But you are….you could have been….you…."
He reached up, touched her cheek with his hand, brushing away the tears from her face. "Sshh," he whispered.
"I still miss him so much. He could always make me smile, laugh, even when I was so sad." Tom pulled her against him, held her head against his chest.
"You aren't my daughter, either. My daughter died, on the same day you lost your father. But, like you said, you could have been. Should have been." He lifted her away, held her by her shoulders, almost shaking her to make his point clear. "I can't begin to tell you how proud of you I am. What an extraordinary person you've become, despite all the pain in your life. Your father wouldn't have felt any different."
She sank back into his arms, sighing, absorbing the words and letting them salve her wounds. She lost track of time.
The panel beeping disrupted the stillness and peace. She bolted upright, to see the sensor display. The Yeager was on an intercept course, shields up. "We've got company," she said tightly. "Dad, shields," she said, distracted, not hearing the words that had come from her mouth.
More spectacularly, he never flinched. His voice was lighter when he responded, his sadness dissipated. "Shields up. Tell them not to put the coffee on. We can't stay."