Chapter 12

"Tom, what are you doing out of your room?"

He looked like a small child being caught stealing a cookie before dinner. "I…I thought you were all on the bridge," Tom answered feebly.

"Everyone else is," B'Elanna told him, "but they could come down here at any time. Do you know what the Andorian will do if he catches you roaming the ship? He'll assume you're a rebel spy."

"Oh."

"What were you doing, anyway?" B'Elanna asked with curiosity. "Weren't you scared to leave your room?"

Tom grinned sheepishly, and his face turned pink. "I was looking for the bathroom. There isn't one in my room."

B'Elanna laughed in response to this, and she led him down the corridor. "Next time, use the comm panel to call me, okay? I'll have someone escort you."

"There's no comm panel in my room either."

B'Elanna couldn't help smiling. "So I guess life here isn't that much better than Aldebaran."

"I wouldn't say that," he replied, sharing her smile. "I might not be able to relieve myself whenever I want to, but the food's a lot better." His eyes penetrated hers, and she found herself looking away with mild embarrassment. "And you're a much more benevolent captor."

They stopped in front of a small, unmarked door. "Here we are."

Tom leaned on the door frame, still smiling at her. "Are you going to wait here to make sure I go back to my room without staging a prison break?"

To B'Elanna's delight, he didn't seem to be afraid of her anymore. In fact, he seemed…

He's flirting, she realized. And he's just like Tom when he does it.

She leaned against the wall of the corridor, contemplating this, as he went into the bathroom. He'd come a long way from the man who nearly cried when she first tried to speak with him. When he reemerged a minute later, she gave him a winning smile as a prize for his budding confidence.

"You look pretty happy," Tom observed. "The raid must have gone well."

"Actually, I don't know about that. No one was hurt, and we got Harry back, but I think we might have to stage an attack now to help the propaganda machine."

"Harry," he repeated, "your friend, right?"

"Mm-hmm. Want to meet him?" She stopped in front of a door a few down from his and entered the command sequence to open the lock. "Harry?" she called as they stepped in.

"Hey, B'Elanna, what the – Tom? What are you doing here!"

"For the hundredth time," Tom said, "I am not your Tom. And you're not Harry."

"Well, I am, but I'm the one who kept telling you different species ought to be able to live together in peace, not the one who wanted to get you all killed."

"Then I guess we're all acquainted," B'Elanna said with a forced smile, feeling not unlike the hostess of a party with a poorly planned guest list.

Fortunately, Harry was all business. "B'Elanna, are they going back to the base?" She nodded. "There are a lot of good people there. Isn't there some way we can throw the Klingons and the Cardassians off?"

"This ship has a lot of good people, Harry," she replied. "The Obsidian Order – if you can believe this – is trying to reform the Alliance. They hate the idea of interrupting the rebels as much as we do, but if they don't, there are going to be too many questions by people on the ship we can't trust. And when word gets out that they located a rebel base and left it alone, no one will take them seriously when they try to claim power in the sector. They'll be discredited as traitors."

"Why are they being so secretive?" Harry asked. "If they want to reform the Alliance, why can't they just tell everyone their intentions?"

"Because they would be killed," Tom explained.

Harry looked at him for a brief moment before returning to his line of questioning of B'Elanna. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"They want me to assume power as some kind of political figure because I'm Klingon."

Harry shook his head and let out a little breath. "B'Elanna, we're not supposed to get involved –"

"Don't lecture me, Harry," she snapped. "It's not as if I had a lot of choice. The Cardassian, Damar, promised me access to technology that would get us home if I cooperated. Besides, you were working with the Terran Rebellion!"

"I held out as long as possible. The captain even threatened to execute me!"

"The captain?"

Harry nodded. "She's a leader in the Rebellion. They were creating a holographic army – the Doctor's creator…Zimmerman, and this other strange man. But they couldn't get the portable emitters to function, and I refused to help them until right before you arrived."

"What were they doing wrong?"

"They couldn't get the power cells to last long enough. Once the holographic soldiers came online, they would start blinking in and out after a few minutes."

"How did they design the emitters?"

"Backpacks to be carried by the rebels."

"They were trying to project around themselves? They should have been thinking about an emitter attached to the holograms, not the people."

"That's exactly what I was going to suggest to them when you came."

B'Elanna realized Tom looked bored by all the technobabble. "Well, we have to raid the camp, Harry. We don't have a choice."

"B'Elanna," he said gently, "I don't mean to question your decisions, but have you tried getting access to Damar's technology without his help?"

She shot him a cold look. "What do you think I've been doing every spare minute I've had, Harry? Drinking kenar and singing songs about the glory of Kahless?"

"Sorry."

"His personal database is encrypted, and I've been trying not to call attention to the fact that I'm trying to break into it." She was only partially mollified by his apology. "I could really use some help." Slowly, very slowly, something occurred to her – something she'd been too distracted by flirtation to see earlier. "Tom, how exactly did you get out of your room?"

"Uh…"

She turned to Harry to explain. "Just now, I found him roaming the corridor alone, even though he was supposed to be locked in his room."

"I was told Aldebaran was where they took the worst offenders," Harry remembered. He turned to Tom. "Were you really at that camp because the Klingons raided your home?"

"I wasn't part of the Terran Rebellion," Tom avowed, looking quickly between them. "I meant what I said about heroes getting killed."

"But?" B'Elanna prompted. She crossed her arms over her chest and gave him a look that said it was time to fess up.

"My sisters had been teaching me how to override electronic locks. They broke into a food warehouse because we were hungry. I was just the lookout."

"But you learned what they taught you," B'Elanna finished. Tom's eyes cast downward guiltily. "What made you decide to risk trying to see what you've learned today?"

Tom bit his lip. "I guess – I guess because of you."

She knew Harry was swiftly drawing conclusions about what had been going on in his absence. "All right," she said summarily, "you two will work on Damar's database together while I try to keep the damage to the rebel base to a minimum. Harry, are you ready to look over our sensor readings to show us where we should hit?"

"Can I get a shower first?" Harry asked unexpectedly. B'Elanna took a good look at him: his ordinarily lustrous hair was slick with grease, his face was dirty, and he smelled. It was hard to notice at first – on a ship full of Cardassians and Klingons, she'd become accustomed to stench – but Harry probably hadn't had access to proper facilities since their arrival. She also noticed he was favoring his left side.

"Are you all right?"

"Seska's guards got a little rough with me. I guess all the running around has made it flare up again."

She wanted to ask what "a little rough" meant, but she could probably guess. While she'd been riding around her own ship as the queen of the alternate universe, Harry had been beaten and left in unsanitary conditions. She wished they could have traded places or that she could have rescued him earlier, to spare him the pain. She knew he'd never complain about it.

"I guess I'm the hall monitor today," she said with a forced smile. "Come on, I'll show you to the bathroom."