Smoke and Mirrors
By Kezhke
Disclaimer: Star Trek and its characters are the property of Viacom/Paramount/CBS, and I am just borrowing them for fun, not profit.
Synopsis: When an away mission goes awry, B'Elanna Torres and Harry Kim are thrown back to the Alpha Quadrant – but home isn't the place they remember it to be. Set between the "Year of Hell" that wasn't and "Random Thoughts."
Notes: This story follows "In a Mirror, Darkly" (ENT), "Mirror, Mirror" (TOS), "Crossover" (DS9), "Through the Looking Glass" (DS9), "Shattered Mirror" (DS9), and "Resurrection" (DS9). You will be able to read this if you haven't seen those episodes.
If you aren't at all familiar with the mirror universe, I offer a caveat. There are a few rules to the mirror universe that don't match our own: the low guy on the totem pole gets to be the hero, the hero can be killed (or, worse, be a loser), and violence is a way of life.
Books aren't canon.
Pairings: A few, but none of them in *our* universe!
Spoilers: Caretaker, Emanations, Dreadnought, Deadlock, The Thaw, Basics, The Chute, Scientific Method, Muse
Chapter 1
Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres was struggling to stay in the pilot's seat of the shuttlecraft Sacajawea as it pitched violently in the ion turbulence. Ions, she thought dryly as she gripped the console with her left hand and pulled herself back into the chair. Charged particles. Not like hurricane-force winds, but – she paused in her reflection to stab a button that would increase power to the inertial dampers – certainly feels like it in type-12 shuttle.
An automatic red alert sounded, and B'Elanna looked at the readouts in front of her with dismay. The attitude stabilizers had gone out, leaving the computer mind of the shuttle with no sense of "up" or "down" in the vast vacuum of space. But with the artificial gravity plating inside the shuttle still functioning, B'Elanna was quite aware of her sense of "up," and when the shuttle tipped abruptly forward, pushing its way through space by its roof, she once again stabbed at the inertial damper controls, lest her two Klingon stomachs both become queasy.
It was time to admit the mission wasn't going as planned.
"Sacajawea to Voyager," she called over the comm. "We've hit an ion storm. We've lost power to the warp drive, and I'm losing control of the thrusters." She spun quickly in her chair. "Harry! I need you up here!"
Ensign Harry Kim stumbled, rather than walked, from the aft of the shuttle to the copilot's seat, into which he fell heavily. "Bad news," he said glumly. "The dilithium's fractured from all this rocking."
"Damn it! We spent six hours collecting it!"
"I don't think that's the worst of our problems," Harry said with slight trepidation.
B'Elanna looked at him, but he was pointing at something on the sensor display. "What?" she prompted curtly.
"Our ion storm," he called over the din of the red alert and the rising sound of the hull quaking. "It's not a storm at all." His tan fingers punched a few controls while B'Elanna awaited an answer, rather impatiently. "I'm reading some kind of displacement wave heading toward us."
"It's not related to a coherent tetryon beam, is it?" Her voice carried equal parts humor and dread.
"The good news is no. The bad news, I don't know what it is."
The shuttle rocked violently, being pushed back in the direction from which it came, and this time the inertial dampers weren't able to keep up. Harry and B'Elanna were thrown from their seats. Harry's head struck the bulkhead behind the copilot's seat, rendering him unconscious before his body crumpled to the floor. B'Elanna watched in shock, but as she tried to crawl to her crewmate, the shuttle once again rocked, and she slid helplessly across the floor toward the rear cabin.
"Where are we?" Harry's voice was groggy, his mouth thick and dry.
"We're still in the shuttle."
Harry slowly opened his eyes and realized he was lying atop the storage compartment, where B'Elanna must have moved him to rest. He sat upright slowly and took a moment to collect himself.
B'Elanna looked over her shoulder at him. "You hit your head. I was knocked out right after you, but I came to about five minutes ago."
Harry rubbed the back of his head, feeling an egg-shaped reminder of the incident. "No, I meant, what's our position? How far are we from Voyager?"
"The good news is that we don't have to worry about being lost in space anymore," she replied, mimicking his earlier sardonic delivery. "The bad news is that we're sixty thousand light-years from our last position."
"From what I can tell, we're nearly back where Voyager got lost in the first place," Harry said. "But how is that even possible?"
"I was only kidding when I suggested that the displacement wave was from the Caretaker, Harry," B'Elanna scolded lightly.
"Well, here we are, right along the Bajoran-Cardassian border." He pointed at the sensor display in front of him, which he'd overlaid with a star chart of known territories from the database.
B'Elanna leaned over his shoulder to take a look. "Greeeaaat." She sighed. "Well, we might as well contact the Bajorans. I can't imagine the Federation's gone to war with them since we left. Maybe we can make our way to Deep Space Nine."
Harry looked down at the display. "We've got a ship on sensors. It's about a light-year away and closing fast." He looked up. "It's Cardassian."
"I'm not talking to any Cardassians," B'Elanna said definitively, crossing her arms over her chest.
"B'Elanna, we don't really have a choice," Harry pointed out. "They're hailing us, and we're supposed to be allies."
"I don't care. I can't deal with Cardassians."
"If we're really back in the Alpha Quadrant, you're going to have to deal with them." His console beeped three times. "They're hailing us again. We have to respond."
"You respond," she said, swiftly rising from her seat.
"Where are you going?" he called as she retreated to the rear of the cabin. B'Elanna was one of his closest friends, but sometimes Harry just couldn't fathom how utterly stubborn she could be – and how unwilling she sometimes was to step outside her comfort zone. He sighed and activated the comm. "I'm Ensign Harry Kim of the starship Voyager," he began, but the face staring back at him across the comm made him stop cold. "Seska?"
"How do you know my name?"
"Because…because…what are you doing here? I thought you were with the Kazon!" He paused. I thought you were dead, he really wanted to say, but he somehow didn't think he ought to reveal that.
"Who are the Kazon?" she asked impatiently. "Stand down. You are outside Terran space. Prepare to have your shuttle impounded. We're taking you to Terok Nor." The comm went dead.
He felt a slight lurch as the shuttle was pulled alongside the Cardassian ship. "B'Elanna!" he called to his friend. "You're not going to believe this."
B'Elanna emerged from the cargo hold, having verified that the dilithium they'd spent hours collecting was, indeed, worthless. "Let me guess," she said crankily. "They told you to get out of their space."
"No, B'Elanna," Harry tried to explain, but she stormed to the front of the cabin and cut him off.
"Are they tractoring us? How dare they!"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Harry said with annoyance. "And the Cardassian who commed us…B'Elanna, it was Seska."
Her eyes widened. "What?"
"She said she was taking us to…" He tried to remember what Seska had said. "Terok Nor."
"That's what the Cardassians called Deep Space Nine," B'Elanna said, taking the pilot's seat again. She called up the menu for the phaser banks, but Harry grabbed her hand before she could power them up. "We have to disengage their tractor beam, Harry."
"If we fire on them, we could be starting another war between the Federation and the Cardassians."
"If the Federation still had any power, the Cardassians wouldn't have taken the station back," she pointed out. "I think it's safe to assume something has gone very, very wrong since we left. We need to get away from them so we can figure out what's going on. Just let me disrupt their beam."
"But what if they fire back?" he argued. "Look at the size of that ship. I'm sure they outgun us."
B'Elanna's eyes narrowed for a moment, indicating she was lost in thought.
"We could take the EVA suits," Harry suggested. But he didn't finish the scenario. B'Elanna's sharp look told him that it was obviously a bad idea. Even if they didn't go out the airlock but transported themselves into space as far away as they could, the Cardassians could still find them and pick them up. Or, worse, they'd be stuck in space with no food or water, waiting for someone to rescue them before they depleted their oxygen supply.
"The transporter." It wasn't a suggestion, so much as a definite statement. Though she was the ranking officer on the mission, B'Elanna had never really ordered Harry; they usually worked well enough together to avoid the chain of command. Now she assumed he'd see that her plan was better than his without having to pull rank. "We'll put the transporter in a looping diagnostic cycle and set it to rematerialize us in a given period of time – say, three hours."
"There's no guarantee that in three hours we wouldn't still be found and arrested by Seska."
"I know…" B'Elanna frowned. "We'll have to do something so they don't just find us in the pattern buffer."
"I think I've got an idea," Harry said suddenly. He pulled a phaser out of the compartment beneath the helm, adjusted the controls, and shot B'Elanna suddenly. Her eyes widened when she realized what he was doing, but she didn't have a chance to respond. She reeled for a moment, and then, as he should have expected, came at him in all her Klingon fury.
"What the hell did you do that for?"
"If we leave cellular residue and energy discharges in the cabin, they might think we committed suicide to avoid capture."
B'Elanna ripped the phaser from his hands, quickly adjusted the setting, and shot him point-blank. As Harry slumped in the pilot's seat, dazed, she smirked. "You could have at least warned me."
Harry shook the fog out of his head. "What level was that?"
"Oh, relax, I lowered it since you're human."
"Didn't feel lowered."
"You want me to shoot you at a higher setting so you can see the difference?"
Harry clenched his jaw slightly.
"Come on," B'Elanna said with a smirk, "let's get on those transporters."