Chapter 2

Harry gave a loud groan as one of Seska's goons kicked him square in the kidney. He had long ago lost track of all the punches and kicks, but he was certain that this last one was going to leave him urinating blood for several weeks. He'd slid out of the chair they thoughtfully hadn't tied him to several minutes before, and he was now lying naked on the floor, his face in a puddle of his own blood and saliva.

"Let's try again, human," the Cardassian growled. "How do you know Seska's name, and where did you come from? Your ship came out of nowhere."

The Cardassians hadn't mentioned B'Elanna yet, and under the circumstances Harry thought he shouldn't either. If she got away somehow, better to let them think I was alone, he rationalized. I'm sure she'll come back for me.

"Like I told you before," Harry said, pausing to spit out a mouthful of blood, "I don't understand how this happened, but when I left, the Federation and the Cardassian Empire had a treaty. I was in a shuttle, and I hit some kind of displacement wave, but before that I was in the Delta Quadrant, sixty thousand light-years from here."

"Again with the same lies!"

"They're not lies," he said with quiet futility.

The two guards looked to Seska for advice. "He's not going to tell us anything but his fabricated stories," one said. "He's a waste of oxygen. Let me kill him."

Seska emerged from the shadows in the corner of the room. "Don't be ridiculous," she said easily. "He could be a useful worker. Have him put with the others being taken to Aldebaran. They'll pay us at least twenty leks for him."

The guards nodded their compliance, and Seska started for the door. She paused in the corridor and looked back at Harry, still lying naked on the floor, curled in ball, and shook her head with disgust.

B'Elanna still wasn't sure why she had rematerialized in the Sacajawea alone, but Harry was nowhere to be found, and his pattern was no longer in the buffer. The transporter records showed he had rematerialized safely two hours before her. He had survived the looping diagnostic, but she had to assume he had been taken by the Cardassians. It was up to her to find him, fix the ship, get them away from the Cardassians, and figure out a way to contact Starfleet. A big challenge, but she could do it. She had to do it.

Still unsure why the Cardassians were taking Federation citizens into custody, she decided to shed her Starfleet uniform. She rummaged around the duffel bag she'd brought, giving a small smile at the sight of her stuffed Toby the targ, always a comfort to her on an away mission, and she reached for a civilian jumpsuit she'd packed in case she and Harry had to stay out longer than the one day they'd anticipated.

She quickly changed into the maroon outfit and slipped out of the shuttlecraft and into the Cardassian shuttle bay. It was dark and drab – just like everything Cardassian, she mused as she waited for the heavy door to roll open. She stepped over the lip of the airlock and into the corridor.

There weren't any Cardassians in sight, but B'Elanna recognized their scent. Instantly she was transported back to her days in the Maquis – which was strange, as she'd now served as a Starfleet officer on Voyager longer than she had ever been in the Maquis. But the smell – a sort of warm, fishy air – brought back memories of a time when that smell was always mixed with plasma leaks, blood, and charred flesh. Her two stomachs revolted at the reminder.

Harry was in a small cage – no, a cage would have had open sides, or sides with bars – it must have been a box. Or a very, very small room. He didn't think he could stand; the Cardassians had done a good enough job making sure his legs were weak. But he could tell from the feeling of the ceiling closing down on him that even if he could stand, the cell wasn't tall enough to allow him to. One of the side walls butted against his back, still naked, still bloody (but thankfully not cold, since Cardassians tended to prefer warmer climates than humans). The other wall of the cell was somewhere in front of him. He could just reach it with his fingertips, leaving him to estimate that he was in a space no larger than one meter cubed.

The door, or wall, or front of the cell opened, flooding him with the gray-red light of the Cardassian ship, and he was hit in the face with something scratchy but pliable. It took a minute to register that it was clothing being given to him.

How can I put this on in here?

Favoring the side the Cardassian had kicked, Harry slithered as well as he could into the legs of the jumpsuit by bracing his head against the ceiling of the cell. Then he wiggled his hips, trying not to yelp in pain, as he struggled to pull the suit over his chest and put his arms through the sleeves. It faintly occurred to him that he was still wearing his Starfleet-issue boots, a fact for which he was grateful. Starfleet boots were highly durable, constructed to last through combat and extreme environments. Harry had once been ordered to jog laps around the track in them when he was a cadet, a task which had left his poor feet blistered and sore, but now he understood that what the boots didn't accomplish in exercise training, they more than made up for in survival situations.

A few minutes later, the door opened again, and a strong arm yanked him out of the cell and onto his wobbly legs. Harry blinked a little into the light and was grateful that Cardassians kept their ships dim after the utter blackness of the cell. He was standing attention before a few armed guards and was flanked by several other scraggly-looking humanoids in equally shabby clothing.

"You are being taken to a work camp on Aldebaran," one of the guards explained. "The transport ship is waiting for you. Get moving."

The guards pointed their disruptor rifles in one direction, and Harry and the line of prisoners obediently filed out. They were herded through the corridors of the ship to an airlock. Then they were marched onto the cargo transport, where they were mercifully left unfettered as the ship made its way to the work camp that, Harry suspected, would either bring relief from the torture of being on a Cardassian ship or, worst case scenario, his death.

B'Elanna moved stealthily along the darkened corridors of the Cardassian ship, trying not to let it conjure up memories of her time in the Maquis – or her time spent with Dreadnought. When she found a control station, though, she had to begrudgingly admit that Dreadnought had at least afforded her the chance to learn how to read and manipulate Cardassian computers. She tried to access the internal sensors to scan for human lifesigns. She found several: two decks up and nearly half the ship over. There was a turbolift a few meters from her current position, but that seemed too risky. She opted for the nearest access conduit, which was right underneath the console.

B'Elanna slipped quietly into the conduit and crawled as quickly as she could in the direction the computer had indicated. In the silence of the conduit she could hear the sound of her heart beating furiously, her predatory Klingon reflexes on alert.

Cardassian ships weren't built like Starfleet's. On a Starfleet ship the Jefferies tubes ran both vertically and horizontally, connected at large junctions that were tall enough for the average humanoid to stand in and wide enough to accommodate several crew members and large pieces of equipment. It took up a lot of interior space on a starship, but in the event the turbolifts went down, it was a necessary sacrifice. The Jefferies tubes may have also made the lives of engineers difficult, as they perpetually crawled around on hands and knees – no claustrophobics allowed in her department – but the sheer span of the tubes and the accessibility they offered to the inner workings of the ship made it worthwhile.

Cardassian ships, she'd learned from studying schematics in the Maquis and from her quick glance at the console, had vertical and horizontal access conduits, but they did not intersect. In other words, once B'Elanna reached the end of the conduit she was currently crawling through, she'd have to take her chances emerging once again into the main corridor before she could reenter a horizontal conduit and make her way up two decks.

As she reached the end of the tube, she found the access panel and with some force jimmied it open. But before she could remove it completely and slide out, two things occurred to her at the same time: one, that she heard boots coming down the corridor toward her current position, and two, that she hadn't logged off the console when she was accessing the internal sensors. She had essentially given her position away, and as the panel was ripped from her hands, B'Elanna realized the Cardassians had taken her gift to them.

"Get out," one barked.

She could only see their legs and boots, but the end of a disruptor rifle pointing into the conduit did much to motivate her. She slithered out and straightened herself.

The Cardassians stared at her for a moment, and then turned to each other with expressions of awe on their face.