The Ring

Chapter 3

The room was dark when he opened the door and no light shone from the adjoining bathroom. Kathryn must have gone for a walk. She had walked away alone after the first day of debriefing adjourned, while he stayed behind, talking to the crew, gauging their morale, reflexively playing XO. He rubbed his face with both hands, a little disappointed that she hadn't waited, but not all that surprised. He couldn't think of any blow, short of the loss of a crewmember, that would hit her as hard as this. After all they'd sacrificed, he felt almost overwhelming anger that Starfleet, and the citizens of the Federation themselves, could turn on not just the Maquis, but the entire Voyager crew this way. He wanted a stiff drink and something solid to punch.

The door shut behind him and left him in only the weak light of the Starfleet campus beyond the windows, now mostly dark itself. They were housed on a low floor in an older residential facility for officers – no high status accommodations for this crew – with no view of the city or the bay. He just stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust. In a few minutes he would rouse himself, splash water on his face, get out of this uniform he'd rather burn than wear at the moment, and go find Kathryn to get something to eat. But just now he needed silence.

A small clink on the far side of the room, near the windows, distracted him from his brief meditation. He blinked in the darkness and gradually made out a figure in a thickly upholstered chair pulled up next to the window.

"I'd ask what you're doing sitting in the dark, but it seems like a stupid question under the circumstances," he said, toeing off his boots and crossing the carpeted floor in stocking feet. She had her legs curled under her and a glass in her hand.

"I'm tasting the bottle of Glenmorangie Admiral Paris sent," she told him. "Want some?"

He reached for the glass and took a sip. "Not bad. I guess we still have one friend." He looked around for a matching chair, but there was none in the small room they'd been assigned. He lowered himself onto the end of the bed with a sigh. They'd spent the day under interrogation, answering questions about unfounded accusations and wild rumors he couldn't believe he was hearing repeated by Starfleet officers. Had they enslaved other species? Had they tolerated capital punishment? Torture? Had their actions triggered alien civil war? Had they taken sides in alien conflicts? Had the crew engaged in open fraternization, including authorization of holographic sex with persons now living? The stories went on and on, some based in reality, others completely unmoored from it, growing more and more sordid as the hours went on.

He'd watched Kathryn go from outraged to shocked to embarrassed to something that almost looked like defeated toward the end of the day, when Admiral Reinhold asked her if it was true that she'd had sex with a hologram in front of crewmembers in a holographic representation of an ancient Irish village. The sight of her lowering her head as if she'd been struck, while he sat on the opposite side of the room, powerless to help her, then gathering herself to lift her head again and say again, without emotion, to her interrogator, "No sir," would haunt him the rest of his days, or at least until he'd had a good deal more of that Scotch.

When he stretched out the hand with the glass in it to gesture for a refill, he saw the pad abandoned on the chair by her side. "What are you reading?" he asked as she tipped a little more whiskey into the glass. Her eyes cast down toward the pad, then shut as she turned her head away from it and him. Blindly, she picked it up and held it out. He began to scroll through unfamiliar images and videos – faked, obviously – of the Voyager crew engaged in many of the crimes alleged against them today. Many of the images were far worse than what they'd heard from Starfleet. The images were exaggerated, disgusting, horrifying, titillating, obviously designed for some sort of commercial distribution. They were cleverly composed to look exactly like the Voyager crew. Even Voyager's interiors and holoprograms were reproduced in perfect detail.

His mouth fell open as he clicked on an image that opened into a vid of him and Kathryn in her ready room, Kathryn on her knees before him while he laid back on the couch, moaning, his trousers open – yes, a scene he'd fantasized about but that had never come remotely close to happening. He threw the pad at the wall and followed it with the glass, which shattered in a much more satisfying way. He dropped to his knees before her and grabbed the arms of her chair. "Whoever's responsible for this, we'll find them. We'll clear everyone's names and punish the filth who did this, I swear to you, Kathryn."

She stayed huddled in the far corner of the chair and lifted a hand to her mouth, eyes cast down. "That last one," she said, making a tiny movement of her head in the direction of the cracked pad now lying on the floor, "my mother saw that, Chakotay. Someone sent it directly to her home comm system, so that it started to play when she activated the console. The look on her face when she called" – Kathryn swallowed hard and hid her face in her hands.

He reached out a hand to stroke her arm but she flinched and pulled her arms tight around herself. "It can never be undone," she said. "Even if the producers of all these images are prosecuted and Starfleet issues universal denials, this is what people will believe. It won't matter that they know it's faked. This is the sort of thing people want to believe about us."

He shook his head. "It's not. People want to believe in heroes, Kathryn, and that's what you are. I will not rest until they understand that." He managed to extract her hands from where she'd tucked them under her arms and held them in his. "The important thing is that we're together. We've never needed Starfleet. We will find a way to make this right, you and I."

She wasn't listening. Her eyes were distracted by a streetlight below them, casting a small ring of light onto the black, wet street. "They said" – she choked on her words and coughed a little before beginning again. "They asked me today how long you and I had been fraternizing. They asked if it had been part of the deal for merging the crews."

"I heard." It had been a low point. She had refused to meet his eyes, as everyone watched them both for some reaction.

Now she studied their joined hands. "They asked me if I thought the quickie wedding would insulate me from the consequences of my past behavior."

He drew her hands up and kissed them. "Don't pay any attention to it. Just say the word and we'll both resign our commissions first thing in the morning and walk away."

She almost laughed, but the sound came out like more choking. To him, she sounded as if she was struggling to breathe. "You don't have a commission to resign, remember? They haven't said anything about honoring field commissions or pardoning the Maquis. Chakotay, we're not guests here, we're prisoners." As she returned her gaze to the street below, a guard with a plasma rifle walked under the street light. "They're using a light hand so far, but I guarantee you none of us would be allowed to leave this compound."

As he watched the guard disappear, the gravity of the situation seeped into the room like a gas. Kathryn's profile was frozen in despair. He had been so beside himself with joy over walking into the debriefings with his wife at his side – nothing could separate them now that she was publicly, openly his, he thought – that it had taken him several hours to absorb the severity of the accusations developing. The questions began innocently enough, then accumulated slowly, as the minutes ticked by, into indictments of the whole crew, and Kathryn in particular. It was like the water warming around the lobster.

By the time it occurred to him to jump up and shout "No! This isn't right! None of it is right!", they'd already been sitting there for hours, going numb in their behinds and losing the will to defend themselves. The questions only grew more outrageous, more like the fake celebrity videos that the public was consuming as fast as shadowy producers could manipulate the graphics and plant the crew in new and more compromising scenarios. What he couldn't understand was why Starfleet was paying any heed to this sort of old school gutter smear campaign.

He rose to stand at the window. "I thought our troubles were behind us," he said with a small huff. "I don't know how to protect you from this. My first challenge as a husband, and I can't even identify the enemy." He looked down at her, his chest tightening with sorrow. It didn't matter for him. People had said all manner of awful things when he'd joined the Maquis, called him a traitor and a murderer. He had a targ's hide where the public was concerned. Let them say or show whatever they wanted about him. But her – she had no idea how to handle this sort of abuse. She'd been her admiral father's, then Starfleet's, golden child, and that had translated to glowing press coverage of her early career. Then somehow, without the least intention, he had dragged her into this gutter with him, where even the effort to get out would dirty her further. He hung his head. He couldn't let them do this to her. "I'm sorry, Kathryn."

"You're sorry?" Her head snapped up. "What do you have to be sorry for? You've done your duty so well that every admiral in the fleet should be lining up to pin a medal on you, and instead they not only allow this trash to be distributed, they buy into it! I'd like to see the whole lot of them tossed into a Hirogen training facility." The fight was back in her eyes. At least his moment of guilt had given her that.

He turned to her and opened his arms. "Come here, Kathryn," he implored. She rose and stepped into him, wrapping her warm self around him as he pulled her close. They stood that way, letting their breathing calm, for several minutes.

"I could not face this without you here," she whispered finally. "And I mean here, like this, as my husband. Can you imagine trying to respond otherwise? Trying to deny that there had ever been anything between us?" she asked him, blinking back tears as she looked up. "It would have destroyed both of us." She gripped his jacket and laid her head back on his chest. "Let them say whatever they want about me. I won't let them do this to you."

The echo of his thoughts choked him up and he laid tearful kisses on her head. "We will fight it," he told her, "but the only thing that really matters is what you think of me."

This brought a little sob from Kathryn that she tried to hide with another cough. She tossed back her hair and gave him her bravest smile. "You are my angry warrior," she declared, "my knight in shining armor. Nothing will change that." He bent down to kiss her damp cheek, her nose, her eyes, her chin, her lips, and then with great tenderness, he led her to the bed.

When they woke a few hours later, hungry, and clicked on the news, a clip from a video of the two of them in that very bed was already flashing on screen. As the vid began, they were still mostly dressed. Janeway was lying back on the bed, pulling Chakotay with her as he pulled her shirt from her uniform trousers. From the angle, it was easy to spot the light fixture that disguised the camera. Both turned toward it, exclaiming in inarticulate outrage. Chakotay, still naked, climbed onto the desk and snatched the tiny device from its hiding place with two fingers. He held up the fist containing the microcamera. "This isn't just vicious gossip," he said, wheeling back toward Kathryn, who had jumped out of bed wrapped in the sheet, cursing and snatching at her clothes as she shouted the command to end the newsvid. "This is sabotage." He picked up one of his socks from the floor and dropped the device into it.

She nodded and put a finger to her lips, signaling him to be silent, then leaned over the small bag she'd brought with her from Voyager and pulled out a tricorder. Silently, still wearing a bedsheet, she examined Chakotay's sock with the tricorder. All that registered was a low intensity electronic field, as if the device were cloaked in some way. Janeway began to enter modifications into the tricorder, tapping at it urgently until readouts began to appear. With a triumphant smile, she showed the small screen to Chakotay. He nodded and made a circular motion with his hand, indicating that they needed to scan the rest of the living space.

Janeway moved around the room, then the bathroom, with the sensor. Along the way she collected four more microcameras, including one she had to unscrew the shower head to extract. She handed each one to Chakotay with a grim look. He dumped them into the sock. When they were finished, he turned on the bathroom sink faucet full blast and submerged the sock.

"I'm sure these are waterproof, but that should stifle the audio," he said. They stood over the sink, staring at the bumpy sock beneath the water's roiling surface.

Kathryn banged the heel of her hand against the countertop. "What the hell?" she exclaimed, fixing his eyes in the mirror. "Who would do something like this?"

"Someone inside Starfleet," he said. "No civilian would have this kind of access, or this kind of technology. Did you see the quality of that video?"

Kathryn grimaced. "I didn't really notice. I was too busy looking for a loose lamp to throw at it."

He managed a weak smile. "Understandable."

She looked back down at the water. "So you think they're audio recorders too?"

This time he turned his head to look straight at her. "You really were upset if you didn't notice that. I could hear your voice on the video."

Kathryn blanched. "What was I saying?"

"You don't remember what you say to me in bed?" He tried to look hurt but only managed to look bemused.

"Of course I remember. I just wondered what got broadcast into my mother's living room."

He put his arms around her. "Nothing but very appropriate words of marital affection," he assured her with a kiss.

She shook her head. "Someone inside Starfleet. And someone with the connections to turn this into a news story, not just some sensationalist garbage that nobody pays attention to. I wasn't listening to the audio because I was listening to the announcer. Fresh allegations of shocking improprieties, including possible criminal activity, aboard Voyager. And they used the video to illustrate it, like us being together was one of those shocking improprieties." She stepped back from him. He'd shrugged on his robe as they were looking for the cameras. Now, at the look on her face, he felt self-conscious about it hanging open and knotted the belt. "What have we done, Chakotay? After all this time, so close to home, I thought it was safe to say yes."

He stepped in and grabbed her hands. "It is safe to say yes. You said yourself how hard it would be to face this if we weren't together. People will see how outrageous an invasion of privacy this is. I'm your husband. We have every right to do everything we did tonight."

She shook her head more adamantly and pulled away from him. "No, I've put you in danger because I couldn't maintain my professional distance. Nobody has been willing to give me a straight answer about the Maquis, and I've given this… this witch hunt fuel to use against you. I'll never forgive myself if you and the crew are harmed." She hurried out of the bathroom to get back into her uniform. He followed closely, arguing, but she wasn't listening. "Chakotay, I have to talk to B'Elanna about this technology, and then see Admiral Paris. We can't trust communications channels, and I know he'll be working late under the circumstances. In the meantime, it would be better if you arranged for separate accommodations for us. This probably isn't the last time someone will try to use our relationship against us. We should maintain proper distance until this is resolved."

"Proper distance?" Chakotay cried, pausing in pulling on an undershirt. "You are my wife! There is no such thing as proper distance. Kathryn, don't let them do this to us, whoever it is." He was unable to hide the note of panic in his voice. Not this, anything but this, his mind was repeating in a frantic round.

She spun around with one hand on the doorknob, ready to storm out to face the latest enemy. Her face softened a degree or two at the desperation on his face. "Chakotay, this changes nothing between us. I love you. We just have to be careful right now. Are you with me?"

He glowered. "That's unfair."

She shut her eyes for a second. "Please. Please don't make this harder than it is. It'll be over soon and we'll walk out of here hand in hand. Are you with me?"

He straightened his spine. He didn't like it. They were better together, and he hated being manipulated by the sort of lowlifes who would do something like this. But Kathryn was asking for his support to fight them. There was only one answer.

"Always."