Chapter 8 – The Best Laid Plans
The EMH made absolutely no secret of the fact that he resented the way he looked or felt as a Narovian, short of being outright species-ist in his rants.
"That … that primitive snout is impeding proper breathing functions," he huffed, as B'Elanna continued to make adjustments to his mobile emitter.
She turned to him, clearly non-plussed, her miniature hypo-spanner hovering in mid-air. "You actually breathe?" she asked. "That's news to me. I thought…"
He glared at her. "In a manner of speaking, I do. My sensory subroutines simulate inhalation and exhalation; of course no oxygen passes into my lung matrix, that is something I am happy to leave to you organics. But in order for me to look as if I were breathing, I have to rely on certain physical parameters. These … puncture holes that pass for nostrils among the Narovians function nothing like the human nose, and I'm afraid your tinkering so far has been purely cosmetic, without takimg the construction of my airways into account. All this to say won't be able to simulate proper respiration with that … that thing on my face."
B'Elanna rolled her eyes. "You look perfectly … Narovian to me, and for what it's worth, you do look like you're breathing like one of them. Look, Doc, I programmed the full Narovian physiology, right from your medical data base into both Sickbay's holoprogram and your mobile emitter. It's just not what you're used to. You're a complete specimen, fully functional in all respects. Including if you were to meet a willing Narovian female and had the time and the inclination. Since you always seem to place such emphasis on your sex life, however theoretical it may be."
His icy glare could have turned the Chief Engineer's smirking lips into a puddle of liquid nitrogen, had she bothered to look up. Instead, she continued blithely.
"So, if you don't feel comfortable, it isn't because there's something missing, but because it's all in your head. I mean, in your cerebral subroutines. Unless you think there's something wrong with those, too?"
B'Elanna straightened up from the bench to the sounds of the Doc muttering imprecations about engineers, and their constitutional inability to appreciate the difference between a wall panel and complex physiology. She ignored him with a roll of her eyes.
"There. All done. I've temporarily increased the capacity of your mobile emitter to download all data from Kalpak station, with the exception of operating and life support systems. But we can't leave the enhancement in place too long or it will overload your other systems."
"That's a relief," he countered acidly. "I was afraid you'd want me to run your warp engines for you next."
"Not a chance, Doc. You'd never be able to manage the right … pulse. Too much Verdi, not enough Marley."
She was spared another retort when the door to Sickbay slid open to admit the First Officer. Dressed in dark brown slacks, a pale blue shirt and scruffy leather vest, and with artificially stimulated black facial hair now shadowing his face into a bluish tint, Jarod Tervellyan looked every bit the freighter crewman he would pretend to be.
"Where's your comm badge, Commander?" the Doc asked. Jarod lifted his vest, to show where it was clipped underneath.
"There's no rule it has to be visibly attached to the outermost piece of clothing," he said simply. "May as well tattoo the word Starfleet on your forehead. I recommend you do the same thing with your mobile emitter, Doc, namely cover it up a little. You can wear regular clothing, can't you?"
The EMH looked puzzled. "I suppose so," he said slowly. "To tell you the truth, I never thought about it before. I've always changed my physical parameters to alter my appearance; I've never put on clothing meant for organics."
"Doesn't that make it too easy to knock that emitter off your sleeve?"
Both B'Elanna and the EMH stared at the First Officer as if he had just metamorphosed into a Pah wraith. Tervellyan shook his head. His thoughts were clearly visible to anyone who cared to look: Some things on this ship really could use a bit of fresh thinking.
They spent the next few minutes in deep technical conversation, with a recovered B'Elanna explaining to the XO how to use the mobile emitter as a download device in the event his tricorder failed him. Finally, Tervellyan nodded decisively.
"Well, I think we're ready. Ayala and Icheb will be in the transporter room I a few minutes, waiting for us. We're going in in parallel. You good to go, Doc?"
Not awaiting an answer, he strode out of Sickbay, leaving the EMH to scramble after him, and B'Elanna unable to wish either of them good luck.
…..
The tinkle of the transporter had barely left Icheb's skin when he turned on his heels to orient himself. They were in the Rigellian's cargo bay, where illumination was at ten percent at best; apparently, its owners saw no need to waste energy unless someone was actually working there. Several stacks of barrels containing the antigen solution loomed in the corner like small, dark mountains, with the metal rims of the individual containers giving off only the occasional dull glint.
After waiting for a couple of seconds to ensure that they had not set off any intruder alerts – not standard equipment on a freighter, but you never knew - Ayala gestured with his drawn phaser: The wall panels. Icheb nodded his understanding. Priority One was to take down the dampening field in the cargo bay, to enable transport of the antigen back to Voyager.Icheb headed for the nearest panel, as sure-footed as only a former Borg drone with residual ocular enhancements could be in the near-darkness.
The big Lieutenant ran his tricorder over the stack of containers and, having verified that they were what he was looking for, nodded to himself and holstered it again. He began to affix transporter tags, one for each stack, with his left hand, without relinquishing the phaser he was holding in his right.
Icheb lifted the panel off the wall with the aid of a hypospanner and entered a few commands. With a satisfied grin he nodded to Ayala, who tapped his comm badge and hissed a one-word command: Now. The barrels started to disappear as soon as he could tag them.
Icheb, for his part, worked to establish a link between the ship's computer and the tricorder he had brought for downloading purposes. Fingers flying, he cursed softly - a habit he had picked up from his roommate at the Academy, a volatile but harmless aspiring engineer from one of the rougher colonies. He clearly would have to bypass a protocol blocking access to the main computer from auxiliary outlets; valuable minutes would be lost.
Icheb's computer was finally signaling an actual data flow had commenced, and Ayala was about three-quarters done, when the bay was suddenly flooded in light and alarm klaxons started blaring.
"Shit," Ayala snarled. "They made your hack job. Let's get out of here."
Both men activated their site-to-site transports for beam-out, waiting for the familiar tingle to wash over their skin. Nothing happened. They exchanged quick, concerned looks.
"They must have reestablished the dampening fields, via central controls," Icheb announced unnecessarily, his clear young voice conveying a mixture of indignation and barely suppressed panic.
Ayala stood still for a split second, his dark eyes darting around the room, looking for all the world like a caged animal searching for the small crack of sunlight that might signal freedom. He threw the remaining few transport tags onto the barrels and turned on his heel.
"The escape pods," he snarled and headed for the door, phaser at the ready, not waiting to see whether Icheb would follow him. That order, he figured, had been given already - by the Captain himself.
Icheb snapped his tricorder shut and holstered it quickly; he didn't think he had completed the download but he also knew what he had to do. He was a trained Starfleet officer now … well, not quite yet, but almost. He pulled out his own phaser and followed Ayala to the exit, swallowing down – what had the Doc called them, the butterflies? – in his stomach at the thought of what might be his exchange of hostilities in the line of duty.
Ayala pressed his big form against the wall beside the exit door, tapped the wall panel and waited until it had opened. He stuck his head carefully into the corridor, only to retract it when phaser fire struck the frame.
"Shit," he said again, in a matter-of-fact tone that would have impressed his young companion had he not been focusing on other matters. Like the Security Chief's decisive wave of his phaser, the slight curving action indicating that Icheb was to attempt to sortie to the left, in the direction of the shuttle bay, ready to fire. A repeat pointing of the index finger in the same direction conveyed the distinct message that he was to go, go, go.
Ayala tapped his own chest and repeated his wrist movement towards the right; he would cover that part of the corridor where the phaser blast had come from.
"My mark. Two – three – one. NOW."
Ayala hurled himself out the door and somersaulted onto the floor, reducing his target even as he brought his weapon up and fired stun blasts in rapid succession at the two Rigellians who were partly seeking cover behind a turn in the corridor. One of them shrieked as his weapon clattered onto the floor before his own collapse.
The other man continued to fire at Ayala, who had regained his footing and was now retreating backwards after Icheb, who was headed for the shuttle bay, and their only opportunity at escape. The Rigellian continued to fire his own phaser, less than effectively from behind his cover position; sparks flew as his shots glanced off ceiling panels and the smell of fried wiring permeated the corridor. Ayala did not need to see the blackening metal to know that the man's weapon was set on maximum.
Icheb had turned the next corridor, and it was only his youthful reflexes that caused him to jump aside as he, too, was met with phaser fire. Everything seemed to slow down as he lifted his weapon, his hand steady, his focus on his green-skinned attacker as clear as if he had painted the man's chest with a targeting laser. He squeezed the trigger and watched the man crumble to the floor, a part of his brain surprisingly able to marvel at the absence of any particular feeling as he did so.
Was he turning back into a drone…?
With the apparently lone attacker in front of him dispatched, Icheb's attention was diverted back behind him, where a sudden sharply voiced command caused the half-hidden Rigellian to jump into the center of the corridor where, free of any obstacle but also of cover, he trained his phaser on Mike Ayala. And fired.
The Lieutenant hissed a sharp curse in a language Icheb vaguely identified as colonial Spanish, similar to what he had frequently heard coming from the Chief Engineer while he was assisting her in the Delta Quadrant. Ayala clutched his right side, his now-useless phaser dangling from his hand. His leg buckled and as he went down, Icheb fired over his head at the Rigellian. The man collapsed without a sound; there was no sign as yet of whoever had ordered him to engage in what could have been a suicide mission, had the Starfleet officers' weapons been on the same setting as their adversaries'.
Nobody gets left behind.
Icheb wasn't sure whether the overriding voice that was reverberating in his mind was the Captain's, Starfleet combat training, or a residual Borg salvage order; it would be heeded regardless of its source. Phaser still trained on the corridor ahead, he bent down and pulled Ayala up into a half crouch, supporting him with his left arm.
"Come on, Lieutenant, we have to go," he said urgently, the simplicity of the words sounding vaguely ridiculous to his own ears. Ayala grunted and got up on his feet, swaying but obviously still able to move, if only by force of will and years of training. Icheb forced himself to look away from the blackened hole in Ayala's uniform, and the red and sticky mass that was beginning to soak through it.
"Let's go," he said again, when a sudden movement at the end of the corridor caught his attention. He lifted his phaser and fired, even as Ayala managed to switch his own weapon into his other hand and do the same. Neither would be able to say afterwards whose shot had been successful, but it didn't really matter in the end.
Half-carrying a cursing and grunting Ayala, thankful for the extra strength bestowed on him by what remained of Borg technology in his body and his blood, Icheb moved the two of them towards where their holodeck exercise had told him the shuttle bay would be.
Four pods, metal dull with age but otherwise unharmed, were lined up side by side in the bay. Icheb headed for the one closest to the airlock, whose forcefield sparked slightly in the dark. He heaved Ayala into the pod and clambered in behind him, checking to see if anyone had followed them in. Not yet.
Icheb slammed the hatch shut and thanked the many hours of piloting-with-your-guts training he had had on the Delta Flyer with then-Lieutenant Paris, rather than the standard sessions at the Academy. He entered the necessary commands for immediate launch even before sitting down, relying on the escape pod to do the rest.
He hissed a gratified yess when the lumbering pod started to move towards the airlock. The pod started to rock slightly due to phaser fire now coming from inside the shuttle bay, but Icheb focused fully on moving the small vessel through the forcefield curtain and out into space. Escape pods, even those built for mere freighters, by their very nature were designed to withstand considerable external abuse, and he was confident that it would survive whatever these so-called freighter crewmembers could dole out with their hand-held weapons.
At least a freighter wouldn't come equipped with offensive weapons arrays, and if it did, would be unlikely to be able to use them effectively while docked.
The escape pod having cleared the ship, Icheb tapped his comm badge and tried to force his voice into as calm a tone as he could muster while still gulping for air from his recent exertions. He looked around at Ayala, who had slid down on the floor and was leaning against a console now, breathing shallowly but giving his young crewmate a weak thumbs up.
"Away Team One to Voyager and Captain Paris, this is Cadet Icheb. Our transporters were disabled and we were forced to steal one of those escape pods we were supposed to look at. Lieutenant Ayala is injured pretty badly. He will be fine, I think, but he should be transported to Sickbay as soon as we are clear of the dampening field. Lock onto me as well just in case, but it occurs to me that it would be desirable if I could bring the pod to Voyager, since we ran out of time to examine it onboard the freighter. So I think I should try and do that, sir. Instead of being transported aboard, I mean, sir."
Back on Voyager's bridge, Tom Paris breathed a silent sigh of relief, even as he smiled a little at Icheb's less-than-clipped sit rep.
"Paris here. Understood, Cadet. You've done well, very well. Yes, do try to recover the escape pod for examination. I'll head down in Sickbay to help with Lieutenant Ayala, since the Doc isn't here. Paris out."
He tapped the console for internal comms. "Sickbay, prepare for incoming casualty. I'll be joining you. Pablo, tractor the pod in as soon as you can; it should be in range shortly."
Tom stood with his fingers curled around the back of the Captain's chair and pulled his lower lip between his teeth. One down, one to go.
…..
Jarod Tervellyan and the Doc materialized in a deserted corridor of Kalpak station, near the waste disposal module. The EMH found himself continuously having to resist the temptation to run his fingers over the ridges on his cheekbones, to feel the flattened nasal bone and slit nostrils. He restricted himself instead to periodically stroking the leather jacket he had borrowed from Mr. … Captain Paris, idly wondering why he had never considered non-holographic clothing before. The weight it settled on his holographic matrix felt … no, that wasn't the right word … made movement a little odd, but not unpleasantly so - even if he'd had to roll back the sleeves a little to make the thing fit.
Approaching footsteps broke him out of his reverie, and he barely managed to gather his wits sufficiently to emulate the Commander, who nodded curtly but politely at the two Narovian maintenance men who came striding purposefully towards, then past, them, hyperspanners in hand and toolboxes slung over their shoulders.
"Act like you belong here, and people will assume you do," Tervellyan advised.
"Right. I will pretend to be an under-educated … what does Mr. Paris call them? Grease monkey?"
"Pretend to be the owner of a Class Four private yacht, for all I care," Tervellyan snapped. "Just stop fidgeting and looking around as if every rivet contains a miniature rendition of the Enigma Tales of Shoggoth, or something else that needs to be absorbed, digested and analyzed to death. Pretend you don't give a shit, for whatever reason suits your fancy, and you'll be fine."
It was clear that the Commander was not in a particularly patient mood. In fact, the Doctor was fairly confident that if he could surreptitiously run his tricorder over him, the diagnosis would be a case of acute vasoconstriction due to excessive adrenaline. He did not need instruments of any kind, however, to be aware of Tervellyan's accelerated breathing. In fact, now that he thought about it, he could almost have sworn the XO was suffering from acute anxiety.
What the EMH was less confident about was whether his partner had any real idea of where they were, or should be, headed.
"You do have a plan beyond telling me how to behave, don't you, Commander?" he asked, in a voice laced with a judicious amount of acid.
Tervellyan glared at him. "We are heading for an access points from which we should be able to download the station's logs and main operational databases," he said in a low voice. "But I suppose you were too busy keeping your head up your own ass to listen to the Captain's orders?"
Slightly taken aback by the rather personal and scathing nature of the comeback – and blissfully unaware as to his own possible role in provoking it - the Doctor frowned in silence, finding himself irrationally nostalgic for one of the sarcastic remarks that might have emanated from Tom Paris in similar circumstances. He gave a little holographic sigh, tried to ascribe the Commander's foul mood to nerves, and scrambled to keep up with his energetic, angry stride.
They turned a corner, and Tervellyan came to a sudden stop. "Here," he said, all business now. "That wall panel. According to our schematic, it leads to a Jeffries tube that in turn connects to the one that runs up to the auxiliary back-up node for the main operations system. With any luck, no one is scheduled to do any systems diagnostics right now, and we can just patch the data stream through to Voyager."
He loosened the panel and motioned the Doctor to follow him.
"With any luck …?" the Doc muttered to himself as he climbed into the wall opening, behind the XO, idly wondering why they had not beamed straight to their destination. Jeffries tubes were not his favourite place.
…..
Once Tom Paris reached Sickbay, everything that had been on his mind receded momentarily at the sight of Mike Ayala, lying unconscious on one of the biobeds. Nurse Tval had already removed the charred uniform remnants from the Lieutenant's side and sterilized the area where he had been burnt by the Rigellian's phaser.
Luckily, a quick examination confirmed that the wound was not a critical one, and Tom was able to carry out the few internal sutures required without recourse to the surgical arch. A few minutes of work, and his breath hissed out in relief as Ayala stirred and opened his eyes with a barely suppressed curse.
"I think you're gonna be okay, Mike," Tom said, trying to project as much confidence a he could muster while closing up the injuries of an officer who had been carrying out his orders. Something to be shelved for later.
"A few rounds with a dermal regenerator, and you'll be as good as new."
Ayala nodded his acknowledgement of the somewhat imprecise prognosis, and grimaced a little as Tval injected him with a hypospray.
"Shit, I hate meds," he groused, even as the relief from pain he had refused to acknowledge began to relax his features. "Witchcraft for sissies, if you ask me." Then he focused on Tom, his eyes intent.
"The kid, Icheb," he said. "Saved the mission when I got hit. He's the real deal, Tom … sorry, Captain. Should try and keep him on the ship."
Tom nodded. "Planning on it. But your report can wait, Mike. I think I better get back to the bridge, now that I'm sure you'll be okay. Lots of stuff to do, and we haven't heard from the other team yet. Nurse Tval can start dermal regeneration."
"I can do this," a soft voice came from the entrance to Sickbay. All three officers turned to see Lemarr, barely inside the room, her back pressed against the wall as if unsure of her welcome – or her own courage.
"Lemarr," Tom said, hiding his surprise. He had suggested when he had visited her with Miral that she might wish to spend time with Tval, with whom she appeared to have built something of a rapport, but he had not really expected her to actually act on the idea. At least not that soon. Yet, here she was, her unwavering emerald eyes now firmly fixed on Ayala, the price in courage that she had paid for the journey to Sickbay barely audible in her voice.
"I can help heal," she said simply. "I have used this device many times. And I wish to pay this man back for what I took from him. Please."
Tom flinched, as his reluctant mind glossed over just how the young Orion might have acquired her expertise with the dermal regenerator. He bit back a soft curse. But the revulsion he felt was quickly displaced by something else: admiration, and respect.
Here was a woman, barely more than a girl, really, who for years had been used by others for their pleasure, for profit, or for whatever sensation of … power those of a certain mindset might derive from bending another being to their will. But Lemarr Valon, taken so many times, would not take in return. Having seized her chance at freedom on Mike Ayala's back, she was determined to repay him, as best she could, for whatever she felt she owed him.
She would not be one of them. She would choose to be different.
Tom understood, so very clearly. Wordlessly, he handed her the regenerator.
"I think you're in good hands, Mike," he said simply. "Nurse Tval and Lemarr will make sure you get fixed up. I'll see you later. And I'll tell Icheb you commended him."
He gave an encouraging nod to Tval, which the Betazoid nurse returned in kind. She would do her best to allow Lemarr to feel useful. To support her choice.
…..
When Tom emerged from the turbolift that delivered him back on the bridge, he found his Ops Officer ready to pounce on his presence. It was not really a pounce, of course; Asil was far too much a pure-blood Vulcan for that to be an option. But it was clear that she had been waiting for his return; her eyes were on him almost before he entered, without any indication that she had shifted them from anywhere else.
"Captain, may I speak with you in your ready room?"
Tom nodded once and kept walking, knowing Asil would follow him.
Even though he had steeled himself for something less than good news, she still managed to surprise him. "Computer, erect security sound barrier. Asil Pi Delta Nine Seven." More than he felt puzzlement at the unexpected command, Tom was struck once more how much she sounded like her father when she spat out codes like that. As the force field that would muffle all sound waves and reverberations shimmered up and around them, he turned to her in a silence of his very own, awaiting the explanation he knew would come.
"Sir, Crewman Zelis and Ensign Murphy have been working on the transporter signal, as we discussed. They discovered that there was an alternative signal embedded in the coordinates, one that activated as soon as demolecularization was initiated at our end. The destination coordinates are consistent with a ship in orbit around Nemoth II."
"Glad you confirmed that. But we suspected as much already, Asil – so why the secrecy?"
Asil hesitated momentarily, in a most un-Vulcan manner, before straightening her shoulders to deliver the news she knew would come as a blow to her Captain.
"I regret to inform you, Captain Paris, that an examination of the findings that were presented to me have led me to the incontrovertible conclusion that the alterations to the transport coordinates were made from onboard this ship."
Tom stared at his Ops Officer, his mouth opening slightly as if he was making to say something, then closing again. He felt the shock of her statement as something physical, deep in his gut. So this is how Janeway felt, when Tuvok discovered that someone was sending messages to the Kazon.
But then it struck him that, no, this was different. His was not Janeway's motley crew, thrown together by circumstance, with a few psychopathic wild cards and habitual traitors tossed into the mix. His was a crew of handpicked professional Starfleet officers, all of whom – especially the former Maquis among them - had proven themselves in the line of duty. Even the most recent Academy graduates onboard came with a pedigree of references that he himself would not have been able to produce a mere nine years ago, when he was sitting in the Federal Penal Settlement at Auckland with a criminal conviction, a court martial and a forced resignation from Starfleet under his belt.
Tom Paris had turned a corner in his life, one that had led straight to the four pips that now adorned his collar; how hard was it to believe that someone might have done likewise, but headed in the opposite direction?
Tom swallowed the bile that threatened to rise in his throat. Life was full of opportunities, whether they came as the result of hard work, as unexpected gifts, or as unwelcome burdens. Choices, made or denied. Chances, seized or squandered. What could have made a Starfleet Officer choose an organization that thrived on misery and death, all in the name of profit?
At a guess, the answer lay in that last question. Profit. Not a motive that had ever held any sway over him personally – even in his darkest moments, when he was the farthest removed from the humanitarian ideals of Starfleet. How could one be part of the one, but seduced by the other?
He shook off what he knew to be useless indignation, thoughts to be explored later and by better analysts than himself. In the meantime, Asil expected instructions; she would have them. Luckily – or not – tracking traitors was an area in which he did have some hard-won expertise.
"If we do have an agent for the Syndicate onboard, it would stand to reason that he or she has been communicating with their contacts, in addition to engineering the diversion of the antigen. When we were in the Delta Quadrant, we had a spy who used to conceal illicit transmissions by sending them out through the power grid; the messages were encoded in the waste energy from the propulsion systems."
A brief smile ghosted across his face as the odd symmetry of this distant memory struck him. "In fact, your father discovered them. I recommend you run a diagnostic of the last, oh, ninety-six or so hours' worth of all our comms and energy emissions and look for any unexplained divergences."
"Aye sir," Asil replied simply. "I assume that I will have to carry out the task by myself, since we cannot, at this time, be certain that other members of the crew are not implicated."
Tom flashed a quick grin that almost, but not quite, touched his eyes. "I think you can probably safely enlist the Chief Engineer's help; she'll have an idea what to look for, too. I happen to know where she's been for pretty well every day of the last nine years, and doubt that she's had much of an opportunity to join an organized crime cartel."
"Thank you for that suggestion, Captain. I will contact Lieutenant Commander Torres at once." She called out her security code and the force field - which Tom had surreptitiously dubbed the cone of silence when he had been introduced to the new technology at the Kirk Centre - dissolved like a burning shroud.
Tom nodded his dismissal and Asil turned on her heel and left the ready room, unaware of his eyes following her. He once again mentally thanked Tuvok for suggesting that his daughter might have a place on Voyager's crew; Vulcans might be lacking a certain warmth and fuzziness, but there was no one more reliable when you needed somebody to have your back.
…..
The crawl through the bowels of Kalpak station was much longer than the Doctor expected, even though the map that had been entered into Tervellyan's tricorder ensured that the away team would not make any unnecessary turns. At least they had not encountered any more station personnel – something the EMH considered to be a distinct bonus.
Finally, they came to a panel that seemed to be what the Commander had been looking for. He checked their location against the station's map on his tricorder, before running the instrument over the panel to confirm that the room behind it was free of biosigns.
"Does your tricorder show whether there are any booby-traps?" the Doc demanded, even as Tervellyan was opening the panel. The Commander ignored him, and scanned the room with narrowed eyes before motioning the Doctor to follow him inside.
"Here," he said, pointing at a console sitting on what was obviously a frequently used desk, judging by a clutter of PADDs beside the console. The small-radius dampening field emitter beside the desk explained why any attempt to beam directly into the quarters would have been doomed to failure. A favourite status symbol among senior executives, the gadget was not popular with law enforcement for obvious reasons; it certainly was not surprising to the EMH that an official of this station might want one for his office. Still …
The Doctor stepped into the room, frowning. "These are somebody's private quarters, not a command centre. Are you certain, Commander …"
"Yes, they are. And yes, I am. Based on the station schematic, this suite belongs to one of the station's senior officials. Any senior official I know, in Starfleet or elsewhere, is tethered to his work, even in their quarters. And if there are subterranean things going on, we're more likely to find useful records in a personal system, than at a work station that's accessible to everyone from the janitor on up."
"But what if this is not the senior official who is involved in those subterranean things? How would you know that we are in the right place?"
Again, the Commander chose to ignore the slightly petulant question. "Doctor, if you please …? We don't have much time here. It's alpha shift time and the occupant should be off doing whatever they do around here to keep the place running. But we can't count on him keeping regular working hours. So get over here, and we'll start the download."
The EMH huffed a little at the evident impatience in Tervellyan's tone, and took the measure of the room before complying. It was sufficiently well furnished, but lacked any of the personal touches one might expect from someone on long-term assignment. In fact, it was beyond tidy. The only sign that someone actually lived here, apart from those PADDs, was a hairbrush on one of the credenzas.
"Didn't you say – or assume - the occupant was male?" the EMH asked as he crossed the floor.
"Yes, why?"
Silently, the Doctor pointed to the hairbrush. Tervellyan snorted. "What – just because you don't need one, means that other guys don't? I have news for you, Doc. Some of us do, me included. Now can you please take off that jacket so I can get at your mobile emitter?"
The Doctor glowered, but slipped off the jacket as he had been asked. To his surprise, he missed the … solid feel of the piece of clothing, even as he wondered again what on Earth might have caused Tom Paris to burn a hole into its pocket, and then not to have it fixed. Well, the latter oversight was probably just his former assistant's general laissez-faire attitude to life.
He winced reflexively as Tervellyan reached for his emitter. "What?" the Commander asked again. "I'm reliably advised that you won't go off-line when I take it off."
"N-n-no," the Doc, resenting the fact that he was caught stammering, as if he was nervous about what was about to happen. Well, fine, he was nervous. "My matrix retains its integrity within a few meters of the emitter, provided it is active."
"Okay then, so relax." Tervellyan was already focused on punching commands into the console on the desk, and removed a small device from his pocket. He attached it to the console and held the emitter over it, then gave a grunt of satisfaction as the latter started humming with the rapid data stream it was receiving. B'Elanna Torres could be a pain sometimes, but she sure knew her trade.
"Weren't you supposed to download the data to Voyager first, Commander?" the Doctor couldn't resist asking. "I believe I was supposed to function merely as your … how did Mr. Paris put it so delicately … your insurance policy?"
"That's right, Doc, and I'd like to have you in my back pocket before I risk setting off all sorts of alarm bells with a full on data transfer," Tervellyan said, without looking up. "Don't worry, I'm speaking figuratively."
He checked the console and the emitter to satisfy himself that the download was complete. "Done. Here, Doc, take the emitter back. Preserve the data, above all. You get yourself back into the tube and start heading back towards where you won't arouse suspicions; I'll try and initiate the data transfer to Voyager. And just in case, you do remember Plan B, don't you?"
Gritting his teeth slightly, the EMH nodded. "Of course I do. Although I fervently hope that it will not come to that. But aren't we supposed to stay together?"
Tervellyan gave a slightly impatient sigh. "I can crawl through that tube at a far greater clip than you can with those odd knees of yours, Doc. I'll catch up with you in a few moments. Now go, and that's an order! "
The EMH huffed a little as he attached the emitter back to his uniform sleeve and pulled the leather jacket back on over top of it. For good measure, he grabbed a few of the PADDs and stuck them into the pockets, which were surprisingly roomy.
As he entered the tube, he heard Tervellyan curse softly.
"Shit. The system is rigged not to permit transmittals off station. Looks like you're the only game in town, Doc. Plus we may well have set off an alarm. Let's get out of here while we can. Go!"
He was just about to turn and follow the Doctor, when the outside door to the cabin hissed open. He froze in place, realizing that if he headed towards the other room, he would give away the Doc's presence.
Tervellyan's breath caught in his throat, but his immediate impulse - to go for his weapon - was stilled when he saw whom the door had admitted: an Orion female, somewhat older than the dancers and the Dabo girls he had seen on the station, but dressed similarly, in a flowing white dress that revealed the soft swell of a pair of ripe viridian breasts.
There could be only one reason she would be in these quarters.
"Don't be afraid," Tervellyan rasped. "I won't harm you. You can come with me, back to my ship, where you'll be safe."
A small smile played around the woman's luscious mouth as she reached languidly into a fold in her dress.
"Who's afraid?" she purred, and pulled out a phaser.