Chapter 14
"We thought you were dead!" Kathryn declared with relief as Chakotay stepped out of the escape pod.
"How did you find me?"
"We have our sources."
"Actually," Reg began to explain, but Kathryn silenced him with a look.
"Nice work at Aldebaran."
Kathryn beamed. "Wait until you see what we've been working on. Reg and Zimm have come up with a way for us to generate holographic soldiers so that the next time we raid a camp, the guards will target them instead of us. We figure our casualties will be cut in half."
"Only the Alliance might know about the plan now that –" Reg was once again silenced by Kathryn's glare.
"That's great," Chakotay said flatly, clearly not paying attention. "Listen, Kathryn, our next attack isn't going to be a camp. We're going to attack that ship again – with an entire fleet."
"Why?"
"Remember Harry Kim?"
"Which one?" she asked, her lips set in a thin line.
"You met him?"
"He was here. They attacked, took him, and left. Reg thinks he's a collaborator."
Chakotay wet his lips, thinking of the very neat motive Reg had inadvertently laid out before them. They could seek revenge on Harry Kim, and, if all went well, procure a new ship for themselves.
And more importantly, they'd have a chance to face Sub-regent B'Elanna. Chakotay wasn't certain what her story was. She'd seemed reasonable enough when they had spoken – not like a typical hotheaded Klingon. He knew he hadn't really given her a chance, but there was something so abominable about her existence and her usurpation of her mother's power that he found himself unable to think beyond his own prejudice. She had Terran blood, yet she chose to live among the Klingons and claim power in a system that oppressed her own people. She was disgusting. No, worse – she was dangerous. She was a threat to everything they were fighting for. She had to be stopped.
"Kathryn," he said, interrupting her from once again prattling on about what they'd been up to in his absence, "rally the troops. We're going to assassinate the sub-regent."
Harry was studying the decryption algorithm laid out in front of him with narrowed eyes. It was going on hour three of his new project, and he hadn't had much luck yet. He heard noise in the corridor and quickly stowed the padd under his mattress and scrambled to his feet.
"Dinner, Terran," the Andorian announced. He grabbed Harry by the arm, much more forcefully than was necessary, and hustled him into the corridor where Tom was standing beside an old man and woman. Since the incident earlier that morning, the Andorian's disposition had grown decidedly more frigid toward them all.
They marched in silence to the hot gray dining room and sat down. With Chakotay gone, Harry and Tom found themselves at a table alone together.
"How's it going?" Tom asked carefully as one of the Klingons shoved a plate of food in front of him.
Harry looked down at his meal. It was a definite step up from the fish soup on Aldebaran. At least here they tried to duplicate Terran cuisine. Presently he was sitting in front of a plate of some kind of meat and a huge piece of bread. There was a large dish of green vegetables on the table between him and Tom and plenty of water to drink.
"It's going," Harry answered evenly.
"Look, I've met a lot of Cardassians in my life," Tom continued quietly. "I'm telling you, Damar can't be trusted."
"I agree with you," Harry said back in a hushed voice. "Seska and B'Elanna agree with you. What do you propose we do about it?"
"Earlier, when I heard the two of you talking, you sounded like you knew a lot about computers."
Harry smiled. "B'Elanna's the chief engineer on Voyager, and I'm in charge of starship operations."
"What does that mean?"
"It means we know a lot about computers."
"But you're still having trouble with the database?"
"These things take time."
"Let me help you."
Harry speared the green vegetable with his fork and ate a bite. "Do you know anything about decoding?"
"Well, no, but…"
"You know what will happen if we get caught, right?"
Tom nodded solemnly. "Look, I know I didn't make the best impression on you back on Aldebaran, but being around you and B'Elanna…something in me is changing. I need to be a part of this. Please."
Harry gave him a smile. He sounded like Tom, desperately wheedling Captain Janeway to let him take a shuttle on some ill-conceived mission. "You like B'Elanna, don't you?" Tom didn't answer, but his face turned slightly red. "It's okay to admit it."
"I've just never met anyone like her before."
Harry smiled. "I know what you mean."
"Why aren't you eating dinner with her, anyway?"
"She has to keep up the game," Harry explained. "She's eating with him and the rest of the crew, and she's going to come find me later to see what I've learned."
"What have you learned?"
"Not much, but I bet it'll go faster once you start helping."
Tom grinned eagerly. "So you'll let me?"
Harry nodded. "If you can get to my room after dinner, once the guards have gone."
"That I can definitely do."
Several decks up, B'Elanna was having a much less enjoyable dinner with Gowron and Damar. In front of her was a plate of slimy worms, large chunks of meat, and a kind of pudding that looked as though it was made out of blood and intestines. From what animal, she didn't want to know. She'd pulled Gowron aside to ask if she could please be served something more palatable, but he'd only responded by calling her by a few Klingon pejoratives. Sub-regents, he reminded her, don't eat weak Terran food.
There was, fortunately, plenty of bloodwine, which she drank with gusto, matching Gowron gulp for gulp in the hopes that the noises her stomachs were making would quiet if she put something, even liquid, into them.
The bloodwine had loosened everyone's inhibitions. The Cardassians were being more forthrightly devious, and the Klingons had grown considerably louder. Damar had allowed his mask of nonchalance to slip. Underneath he was visibly perturbed by the earlier incident with Seska.
"Do we have reason to suspect she's not loyal to the Alliance?" B'Elanna asked, enunciating her words carefully. She hadn't told them about the message she'd received, and she didn't want to blurt it out as a result of too much bloodwine.
"I don't know," Damar admitted. "I thought for certain she supported the Alliance, but the way she threatened us, I'm not sure."
"Maybe she was really attacking because she knows the true nature of our mission," Gowron suggested pointedly.
"If that's the case, then why didn't her ship attack the rebel base?" Damar argued.
"Why aren't we attacking it right now?" Gowron growled. "Why are we sitting here having dinner?"
"What happened to the escape pod Chakotay was in?" B'Elanna chimed in with a slight hiccup. She caught herself, pursing her lips together in embarrassment, and set her drink down.
"If Seska took Chakotay," Damar hypothesized, "then that means she's really on our side. Of course, she could have been pretending to be on our side to throw the rebels off track."
"It seems to me that you've lost control of this situation," Gowron snarled at him. They didn't exactly seem to be on the same team anymore, B'Elanna had noticed. And she couldn't really blame Gowron. "Do you have any idea who we can trust?"
"Harry, what's a multidimensional transporter?" Tom asked.
"A what?"
"A multidimensional transporter," Tom repeated.
"Where? Let me see." Harry nearly ripped the data padd from Tom's hand and studied it. "Oh..."
"What? What is it?"
"This can transport matter across quantum realities," Harry explained. "It could transport B'Elanna and me back to our universe. I guess we would be close to Federation space, so we could finally tell Starfleet what happened to Voyager." He tapped a few commands on the padd. "I'm going to send this to B'Elanna's personal database, so we can access the specifications."
"You have to take me with you."
"Tom, I can't promise that," Harry answered automatically. "There are rules – "
"I'm standing in the middle of a Klingon ship helping you steal information from a Cardassian," Tom snapped. "You owe me!"
"We'll see," Harry replied evenly. He paused for a moment, examining the transporter schematics. "Tom, this transporter only has a standard range."
"What does that mean?"
"That means that they couldn't have transported us sixty thousand light-years. Something else must have caused our shuttle to travel halfway across the galaxy. Did you read anything in there about spatial anomalies? Or a species called the Borg? Let's see what other tricks the Cardassians have up their sleeves."
He and Tom worked side by side for a minute, searching through the records. The Obsidian Order, it seemed, had access to a wide variety of information that they were trying to keep secret. It was Tom who, on a lark, decided to access the propulsion files.
"Harry," he said slowly, holding the padd out as if it were contaminated, "I think we'd better get B'Elanna."
"We're under attack!" Gowron bellowed across the dining hall.
The flashing red light and klaxon weren't enough of a signal, B'Elanna thought wryly as she hurried behind him in the direction of the bridge. She slid her hands along the bulkhead for support, hoping that it was the attack, not the bloodwine, that was making it hard for her to walk in a straight line.
"It's the Terrans again!" the Klingon at navigation announced to the command team.
"Tell them to stand down," Damar called across the frenzy. The ship rocked violently, sending them all tumbling to port, and like seasoned battle veterans they picked themselves up and immediately returned to work. "Put the sub-regent on screen! Have her –"
"Shields are down to sixty-eight percent," one of the Klingons called.
"Where did they get that kind of firepower?" B'Elanna demanded, her mind still thick and hazy from the bloodwine. "Damar, didn't you say they only had two standard phaser banks per craft?"
"Obviously they've done some upgrading since our last intelligence."
"Shields down to thirty-seven percent," the Klingon reported again. "They're aiming directly at our shield generators."
"Fire back!"
"Hang on, we've got an incoming vessel – it's Seska again!"
B'Elanna sank into the command chair, sensing already that the encore was not going to go quite as smoothly as the debut. She wished she had a station to attend; simply watching the others manage the crisis wasn't satisfying enough.
"Seska's hailing us."
"On screen!" Damar nearly cheered.
"I thought you could use some help."
B'Elanna blinked at the screen for a moment, certain that Seska was speaking directly to her. As the ship pitched again, their eyes remained locked.
"Shields are down!
"Sub-regent, we've got a transport in progress –" The Andorian stopped as the figures of Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay materialized directly in front of B'Elanna, who jumped to her feet.
"Where's Harry Kim?" Janeway demanded, pointing her disruptor rifle directly at B'Elanna's face.
"Stay away from the sub-regent!" the Klingon at the conn ordered. He rose from his seat and pushed himself in front of B'Elanna just as Janeway fired. The Klingon's body disintegrated before it hit the deck.
And B'Elanna was still staring down the disruptor. "What do you want with Harry?" she asked, trying to keep her voice even.
"He betrayed us," Janeway explained. "We don't take kindly to that."
"Consider yourselves prisoners of the New Terran Empire," Chakotay announced, circling the room with his own disruptor rifle in his hands. "If any of you makes a move, your sub-regent's dead."
"Empire?" Damar scoffed. "You have one vessel and a boarding party of two. Just what do you think is going to happen here?"
There was another swirl of a transport in progress, and B'Elanna used the distraction to knock Janeway in the stomach with the rifle. She brought the weapon up to strike Janeway's face and then wrestled it from her hands.
Suddenly Seska and three Cardassians were standing on the bridge, and Damar pulled a small hand phaser from his belt.