Caretaker (6 page)

The bridge itself was small, the synergy among this new crew already bright and strongly active. They were going to be good together, Janeway thought with delight. It was a good ship, and she’d never been so proud to be its captain.

Like an island of discord in the midst of this tentative harmony, Paris stood with his duffel on his feet, looking silently around at all the stations and careers that his past had locked irrevocably away from him. Janeway couldn’t find it in her heart to pity him. Coming to terms with the consequences of your actions was one of the harder lessons of growing up, it was true.

And, as with all life’s lessons, sometimes otherwise promising people got drowned in the backwash of their big mistakes. It might not have been fair, but it was reality. Not even a father in the admiralty could change that. So if Paris couldn’t get used to standing by the wayside while Voyager’s crew did what they were made for, these next few weeks were only the beginning of his problems—because, judging from what Janeway had seen of him so far, she didn’t expect things to change for Paris any time soon.

Stepping down to the command level again, she caught up Cavit’s eyes with her own. It s time, she thought. And he nodded, as if understanding without the need for words.

“Lieutenant Stadi—” The first officer’s voice rang out across the busy bridge, locking in everyone’s attention. “Lay in the course and clear our departure with operations.”

Stadi nodded, bending to her console with fingers already dancing across the controls. “Course entered. Ops has cleared us.”

“Ready thrusters.”

“Thrusters ready,” Kim announced, a little too loudly. Janeway smiled at the nervous excitement in his voice.

I know just how you feel.

Seating herself in the captain’s chair, she forced herself to sit calmly relaxed while every neuron inside her jittered with expectation.

It wouldn’t do for the captain to fidget as they took the ship away from the station. Taking a deep breath in preparation for all the things to come, she lifted her chin and commanded simply, “Engage.”

Not a good start for the day, Tom Paris decided as he paused inside the mess hall to yawn and rub the back of his neck. Less than twenty-four hours on board Voyager, and he’d already managed to look like an idiot in front of the entire bridge crew and still find time to get a lousy night’s sleep. He’d told himself it was the bed—far too soft and well contoured after his accommodations at the penal colony—and that the silence in his sterile ship’s quarters felt too unnatural after the raucous New Zealand nights. But tuning up a track of environmental “music” hadn’t done much to derail the loop of frustrated thoughts whirling around in his head, and transferring to his cabin floor hadn’t made him any more comfortable than the bed had. Deprived of even such harmless illusions, Paris finally had to admit that he couldn’t sleep because he was nervous, and uncertain, and desperate to impress somebody, anybody, on this mission.

And now this.

Kim was the first to look up from the little coffee klatch, and the only one with the grace to look embarrassed. Cavit and Fitzgerald didn’t even bother to avert their eyes when Paris looked directly at them, as though they had a right to be here talking about him and he wasn’t even fit to breathe the same air.

Painfully aware that they were probably right, Paris made his way to the bank of food replicators even though he didn’t feel very hungry anymore.

“Tomato soup.”

The machine whirred to itself for a moment, but no food appeared on its open pad. “There are fourteen varieties of tomato soup available from this replicator,” a polite female voice informed him. “With rice.

With vegetables. Bolian-style—” “Plain.” He was a purist.

“Specify hot or chilled.”

Paris thumped his forehead against the wall and contemplated the likelihood of even the computers on board this ship conspiring against him as a worthless example of the species that created them. “Hot,” he said with some vehemence. “Hot, plain tomato soup.” It seemed nothing in his life was ever as easy as it ought to be.

By the time the replicator had worked out all the refinements and produced a single bowl of plain tomato soup, Cavit and Fitzgerald were gone and Paris was left with the too-hot bowl in both hands, staring across the room at Kim as the ensign suddenly found himself both fascinated by and utterly disinterested in his food.

Paris tried not to be angry with the kid. Hey, he told himself, you knew it couldn’t last. And yet, just as he’d hoped Janeway really meant to give him a second chance on board Voyager, he’d also hoped his past would leave him be long enough to choose his own direction for a change. I guess even warp 9.9 isn’t fast enough for that.

He slipped into the seat across from Kim and ducked forward a little to catch the younger man’s eye when Kim wouldn’t look up from his food.

“There, you see?” Paris said, trotting out his best carefree smile to try and drive away the discomfort between them. “I told you it wouldn’t take long.”

Kim stared at his tray a moment longer, then seemed to make some powerful decision and lifted his eyes to meet Paris’s smile with grim sincerity. “Is it true?”

I don’t know “true” anymore, he wanted to say, but heard his mouth answer, “Was the accident my fault? Yes. Pilot error.

But it took me a while to admit it.” What little bravery he possessed failed him, and he found himself studying the surface of his soup just to have somewhere else to look. It looked more orange than red, and smelled vaguely like ginger. “Fourteen varieties, and they can’t even get plain tomato soup right. …”

“They said you falsified reports. …”

Paris nudged his not-quite-soup with a spoon. “That’s right.”

Kim set his own utensils down to lean across the table. “Why?”

As if the idea would never even occur to him—as if he couldn’t even imagine a situation where doing something so stupid would seem like an acceptable idea.

“What’s the difference?” Paris said, feeling stupid now for expecting anyone as squeaky-clean as Kim to understand. “I lied.”

“But then you came forward,” Kim persisted, “and admitted it was your fault.”

Paris looked up at him and shrugged. It was the most honest thing he could think to do, and even so it didn’t mean much.

“I’ll tell you the truth, Harry,” he sighed, pushing his soup aside.

“All I had to do was keep my mouth shut, and I was home free But I couldn’t. The ghosts of those three dead officers came to me in the middle of the night and taught me the true meaning of Christmas. …”

Suddenly embarrassed by his own confession, he waved the worst of it away. “So I confessed,” he finished, somewhat lamely. “Worst mistake I ever made. But not the last. After they cashiered me out of Starfleet, I went out looking for a fight, and I found the Maquis.

…” He snorted at the memory. “And on my first assignment, I was caught.”

Kim played with his own food for a while, his dark eyes thoughtful.

“Must have been especially tough for you,” he said at last, then added, “Being the son of an admiral.”

Without wanting to, Paris pictured his father the way he’d looked toward the end of the hearing, and couldn’t help wondering why he seemed to have no memories of his father from any happier times.

“Frankly, I think it was tougher on my father than it was on me.”

Standing, he picked up his useless soup and carried it back to the replicator to throw it out. Why should soup get more credit for being what it wasn’t than he did?

“Look,” he told Kim as he slid the bowl into the slot, “I know those guys told you to stay away from me.” He looked over his shoulder.

“And you know what? You ought to listen to them. I’m not exactly a good-luck charm.”

Kim shook his head, a frown settling in between his eyes. “I don’t need anyone to choose my friends for me.” And he smiled, as though proud of his decision.

Paris laughed to himself and rubbed at his eyes. It wouldn’t hurt to have some help, he thought. Especially if your choice in friends doesn’t get any better than me. But before he could make himself say as much out loud, his comm badge chirped and made him jump. He hadn’t realized until then how long it had been since he’d lived with that sound.

“Janeway to Paris.”

Paris tapped his badge, liking the feel of being part of a network again. “Go ahead.”

“Report to the bridge,” Janeway told him. “We’re approaching the Badlands.”

Paris recognized the Badlands the minute he stepped onto the bridge.

Not the configuration of the stars and nebulae so much as the ribbons and flashes of plasma anger lashing and flaring against that blackness like so much wildfire. It had given him a chill in the pit of his stomach when he’d first piloted into the mess with Chakotay, no matter how smug the big Indian sounded when he promised that no Maquis ship had been torn apart by the storms—at least not recently. Then, Paris had consoled himself with the knowledge that Starfleet didn’t have any ships both small enough and weaponed enough to come after the Maquis while they were inside the Badlands protection. Now, standing on the bridge of the very ship built to terrier them out, he felt foolish for that earlier confidence, and worried that his current feelings of safety were just as poorly founded.

Janeway glanced up from the tactical station at the whoosh of the opening doors, her face the same mask of welded neutrality it had been since Paris first laid eyes on her in Auckland. He had to give her credit for that—it was pretty clear she didn’t like him, but at least she didn’t feel the need to broadcast her opinion to the rest of the crew. Unlike Cavit, who moved only grudgingly away from the captain’s shoulder to give Paris access to the console when Janeway waved him over.

And good morning to you, too, Mr. Cavit, Paris thought at him with what he knew was an annoying cordial grin. The first officer must be setting some kind of personal record today for making a pest of himself on someone else’s time.

“The Cardassians gave us the last known heading of the Maquis ship.”

Janeway gathered Paris’s attention by reaching over the security officer’s shoulder to tap at one of his tactical displays. Whether she was oblivious of Cavit’s silent harassment or simply choosing to ignore it, Paris couldn’t tell “And we have charts of the plasma-storm activity the day it disappeared. With a little help, we might be able to approximate its course.”

Following her lead—whatever it was—Paris turned his shoulder to Cavit and bent over the tactical console for a better view of the readout.

Plasma discharge blinked and retreated in random blossoms all over the screen, with the glowing, jagged line of the Maquis’s course dancing back and forth throughout it. The Cardassians had inserted a black marker at the point where they’d been forced to break pursuit, and a dotted line showing how far their sensors had tracked the Maquis after that. “I’d guess they were trying to get to one of the M-class planetoids in the Terikof Belt.”

“That would take them here,” Cavit explained to the security officer without having to be asked, leaning just a little uncomfortably beyond Paris to point at one corner of the officer’s screen.

The security lieutenant nodded, and the image on his display flickered and rebuilt itself, flickered and regrew again. “The plasma storms would have forced them in this direction.”

Janeway nodded. “Adjust our course to match,” she told Cavit.

“Aye, Captain.”

The first officer seemed perfectly happy to disengage himself from the knot around the tactical panel, trotting almost all the way around the upper deck before stepping down to confer with Stadi at the helm. Ah, Stadi. She’d been half-friendly on the trip out. Now, she didn’t even spare him a glance as she set about executing the instructions she got from Cavit. Oh, well.

Paris bid her farewell with a tiny sigh as he followed Janeway down toward her captain’s chair.

“The Cardassians claim they forced the Maquis ship into a plasma storm, where it was destroyed.” Janeway settled into her chair with a frown.

“But our probes haven’t picked up any debris.”

“A plasma storm might not leave any debris,” Paris pointed out.

Janeway shook her head, glancing up at him. “We’d still be able to pick up a resonance trace from their warp core.” Which was true, so Paris didn’t offer any further suggestions.

“Captain …” Kim turned halfway in his seat, as though afraid to lift his hands from the controls. “I’m reading a coherent tetryon beam scanning us.”

Janeway sat forward again. “Origin, Mr. Kim?”

He swung back toward his instruments. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

Then he blinked suddenly, and hesitated for a moment before his hands flashed over his console again. “There’s also a displacement wave moving toward us. …”

The captain rose to her feet. “Onscreen.”

Energy as white and coherent as Paris had ever seen exploded across the viewscreen when Kim brought up the image. Even knowing there must be hundreds of thousands of kilometers between the ship and that seething wave of distortion, Paris had to brace one hand against the back of the command chair to keep from jumping back as Kim increased the magnification.

Janeway moved a few steps closer to the monstrous image, as though she might yet see something the ship’s computers couldn’t tell them.

“Analysis.”

“Some kind of polarized magnetic variation,” Kim reported.

Cavit leaned over the rail from next to the tactical station.

“We might be able to disperse it with a graviton particle field.”

Janeway nodded without turning to him. “Do it.”

Cavit hurried to wave the security officer away from the panel as the captain announced, “Red alert,” and touched a hand to Stadi’s shoulder.

“Move us away from it, Lieutenant.”

“New heading,” the pilot confirmed.

“Four-one-mark-one-eight-zero.”

“Initiating graviton field,” Cavit chimed in, and Paris felt the whole ship tremble as the first officer launched the powerful burst on its way.

Unlike the advancing displacement anomaly, there was no visual track to follow as the graviton field swelled out beyond the bow of the ship and met up with the onrushing enemy. Paris thought he glimpsed a quick flutter in the displacement wave’s integrity at about the point when he knew it and the field would likely cross paths. But it wasn’t a clear or distinctive image, and an instant later he heard Kim announce nervously, “The graviton field had no effect,” and knew he must have imagined the breach.