Chapter Text
January 4, 2372, 20:35
“Next time you shoot me, Captain,” said Lieutenant Paris, rubbing the sore spot on the back of his neck where my shot had tagged him, “give me a bit of warning, okay?”
The holodeck doors opened at our approach and we stepped out into the corridor. Laughing, I clapped a hand to his shoulder, causing a little cloud of blue dust to puff up between us. The movement was awkward given the difference in height between us. It was easy to forget, standing next to Paris while he was seated at the helm, just how tall he was.
“Let’s not have there be a next time, okay Tom?” I said and let my hand slide from his shoulder.
He exaggerated his frown in answer, pouting just a little in a way that had me laughing again, and dropped his hand to his side, his fingers now smudged with blue powder. I looked down at my own hand and saw the same blue dust caught in the lines of my palm.
“If you had been watching for approaching enemies as you were supposed to be,” admonished Lieutenant Tuvok from behind us, “you would have seen the Captain infiltrating your bunker.” Tuvok, by nature, took everything seriously, and defense training was no exception.
“I turned around for one second!” exclaimed a defensive Paris, hands thrown up in the air.
“And that was all it took,” taunted Lieutenant Torres triumphantly as she swished the red flag our team had captured in his face. “Maybe next time you’ll keep a look out like you’re supposed to.” She playfully swatted his arm with the fabric.
To be fair, I had been aiming at the center of his back. But I had been far enough away that by the time my shot connected, he had been dropping to the ground and my capsule ended up striking the back of his neck. The result was a rather blue-haired Tom Paris, the exploding powder having covered him from head to shoulders.
“We were this close!” lamented Ensign Kim as he joined us in the corridor, thumb and forefinger held close together in indication. He, too, was sporting a coating of cerulean-colored powder, though his was contained to his right side.
“When it comes to this ship’s defense, Ensign,” said Tuvok sagely, “‘close’ is never enough.”
Kim blushed, Paris rolled his eyes, and Torres, who had turned away, high-fived Lieutenant Andrews, who’d had the unfortunate luck of getting tagged twice early on in the game. It was enough to turn even his dark-colored skin as red as a cherry. My uncaptainly chuckle at Ensign Kim’s expense turned into a very uncaptainly snort from trying to hold it in before I felt Tuvok’s eyes slide to me, his eyebrow rising in admonishment. I immediately swallowed my mirth and resisted the urge to sarcastically stand at attention and salute him. I was captain after all, and I had a standard to set.
Unaware of Tuvok’s reproachful stares, Torres tied the captured flag around her neck like a scarf. When she noticed me watching her, her fingers stalled momentarily before she grinned smuggly and tied it off with a flourish. I couldn’t help but laugh. This time for real. After I’d tagged Paris out, she’d had a clear path to capture Red team’s flag and win the game for Blue team.
We no doubt made quite the sight trickling out of the holodeck, sweaty and mottled with varying amounts of blue and red powder. Colorful half-formed footprints mapped the way from the holodeck to the turbolift, the red and blue mixing to purple in some places. Down the hall, the turbolift call button looked like my niece’s finger painting. We would be cleaning the up results of this game for a week, but I could not have cared less.
It was the end of Tuvok’s two-day defense training course and we were all in good spirits, either because it was the end of Tuvok’s defense training, or because we had spent the last ninety minutes playing war games on the holodeck rather than toiling at our duty stations.
Tuvok had originally scheduled something much more conventional than capture the flag, but yesterday I had told him to change the scenario, arguing that the crew needed a little fun. Tuvok had objected, not unexpectedly, stating that the ship’s defense was not a matter of “fun.” Smirking, I had agreed with him, and then I promptly told him to change it anyway. We could exercise defensive strategies, hone our combat skills, and have a little fun at the same time. At least for this last simulation.
Two birds. One stone.
It had been a while since we’d had any fun. Not since Kes’s birthday. And that had quickly turned into a crisis we still could not explain when a distortion ring had ripped through the ship, twisting the hull and reconfiguring the decks.
I shuddered in remembrance. Even the thought of the distortion ring was enough to send a phantom pain twisting through my arm, causing me to grasp my elbow.
“Are you alright, Captain?”
I hadn’t noticed that I had quit walking until I was looking up into the concerned face of Mister Paris. Immediately, I released my arm. “Yes, Tom, perfectly fine.” I smiled to make it more convincing. “I’ll see you on the Bridge tomorrow.”
He didn’t look convinced but neither did he press me. With a nod, he hurried to catch his friends in the turbolift.
We were still analyzing the data the distortion ring had uploaded to the ship’s computer, and my guess was that we would be analyzing it for a while. Twenty-million gigaquads is a lot of data to shift through, even with the computer to help make sense of it. Since the ring hadn’t left any lasting damage or injuries, figuring out what it had been trying to tell us was a low priority in the face of everything else the Delta Quadrant threw at us on a near daily basis. But it was an ongoing project for several of the crew when time allowed.
My own memories of the incident were like a confusing nightmare, nothing but flashing images and indiscernible words, louder upon every remembrance until they were now screams echoing through my mind. There was a pattern to it, but not one I understood. Try as I might, I could not make sense of the images. Nor could I replicate the sounds that accompanied them with my own tongue. I was hindered by both language and anatomy. However, the knowledge that it had been trying to tell us something was a certainty I felt in the marrow of my bones.
More recent was our encounter with the 37s and their human descendants. It had been a fascinating, emotional, and inspiring experience, but hardly what I would call “fun.” After spending a day touring the human cities on the old Briori home world, I had been forced to reckon with the possibility of having to continue our journey without many of my crew or even abandoning it all together.
And the crippling relief, so stirring it had seemed a deliverance, when Chakotay and I had walked into a deserted cargo bay was still dogging my steps.
“It appears that your tactical scenario was well received.”
I turned to see that Tuvok had joined me in the corridor. “It was good to see everyone getting along,” I replied, thinking of Torres’s high-five with Andrews.
The teams had been composed of Starfleet and Maquis from various departments, forcing us all to pool out skill sets and work together. It was nice to see the divide between the two crews further diminishing.
“And I think they learned something useful about defensive strategies,” I added, because that had been the entire point of the simulation.
“Indeed,” said Tuvok, unconvinced. No doubt he was thinking of Lieutenant Paris and his momentary lapse in attention.
Personally, I was willing to bet that the teasing Tom was sure to endure for the rest of the week would prove better than Tuvok’s scolding to ensure that he never made the same mistake again.
I chuckled. “Join me for dinner later, Lieutenant?”
Tuvok sighed. “Very well.”
After more than four years serving together, I thought that I had a good read on Tuvok and the emotions he maintains that he does not experience. But sometimes, like then, it was hard to tell if he was annoyed or simply resigned. I had not meant to bruise his ego with a more popular training program, but if I had, the colorful, smiling faces passing us in the corridor made me think it was worth it.
We had needed a respite. Or perhaps it was only that I felt that we needed a respite. And so, while we orbited an uninhabited planet, more than half the crew had been pressed into a massive game of capture the flag under the guise of defense drills. Not that they had needed much convincing: it had been the most enthusiastically attended training scenario of the entire two-day course.
Glaring was Chakotay’s absence, though he had not been too disappointed about missing Tuvok’s defense drills. I know for a fact (because he told me) that our chief of security had reminded him that periodic tactical training was required of all Starfleet officers. Including the first officer. I had nearly snorted at the irony because of anyone on the ship, Chakotay probably needed the refresher the least. In addition to being one of the most notorious Maquis leaders to challenge Starfleet, my first officer literally wrote a book on the subject during his tenure at Starfleet Academy.
Chakotay had taken a shuttle and departed soon after we made orbit to perform a Blessingway ritual in honor of his father.
I had initially balked at his request to leave the ship for what amounted to a solo away mission, but since the ritual itself fell under the definition of “religious freedom,” and use of the shuttlecraft within the confines of “reasonable accommodations,” I had begrudgingly approved his request with a stern look that promised to keelhaul him should he return even a minute after 1200 tomorrow. I had also required that he resubmit his request with a more detailed flight plan so that every kilometer was charted, scheduled, and recorded.
I did not allow myself the cynicism to consider a scenario where he would be forced to alter that flight plan.
I should have known better.
I should have remembered that nothing ever goes according to plan in the Delta Quadrant.
But it was more than a captain’s concern that kept Chakotay on my mind that day: it was the anniversary of his father’s death. Traditionally, he had told me when he first made the request, his tribe actually feared spirits of the dead, believing that they resented the living. He described elaborate rituals surrounding corpses and drastic protocols regarding the deceased’s belongings. Even speaking about the dead or saying their name was at one point taboo because it would slow the deceased’s journey to the afterlife. Their cultural beliefs had changed over time, he had explained, and now, tribal funerals were not much different from Terran ones and attitudes about the dead were much less steeped in “superstition.”
The Blessingway, he had said, was meant to bring harmony and restore balance with nature. “Hózhó” he had called it—balance and beauty. It was a ceremony of healing and restoration. I thought it sounded beautiful. When I had said as much, he’d chuckled slightly and described the practical side of it as “two nights of chants, sweats, and sand painting.” But it was sacred, he had said, and not something to be observed or interrupted, which was why he requested use of a shuttle.
Chakotay’s father had died violently during a Cardassian raid on Chakotay’s home planet. His mother and sister had managed to escape on one of the few transports the colony had, but his father had been among those to remain behind and defend the settlement. Among those, there had been no survivors. It was this event that had precipitated Chakotay’s resignation from Starfleet and entry into the Maquis.
And it wasn’t just Chakotay. Many of my former Maquis crewmen had lost friends and loved ones to the Cardassians. Fighting had given them purpose. But out here…They were now seventy-five years from the fight which had defined them, from the loved ones they had left, from those they needed to protect. I imagined it might feel like coming unmoored, pushed off balance, rudderless on an open sea. There was nothing I could do for them, but that day, remembering the violent event which had taken so much from my first officer, I wished there was.
I hoped the ritual brought Chakotay the hózhó he sought.
Tuvok and I made our way to the turbolift, then departed for our separate quarters to change before meeting in the mess hall for dinner. We had both managed to escape the colorful powder that burst from the capsules to tag a player “out,” but it had been a very competitive game and neither one of us was presentable in our current state.
The turbolift deposited me on deck three, and I made my way down the corridor towards my quarters.
Also absent from the trainings was Ensign Wildman, whose recently discovered pregnancy excused her from any risky combat drills.
Children had become a possibility I was forced to confront when our proximity to a swarm of space-dwelling life forms forced Kes into an early Elogium. She had been worried at the time that it would be her one and only chance to have a child, and had debated the decision with Neelix for nearly two days. For all that I had made it clear that it was her choice whether or not to have a child, I had been secretly relieved when she decided not to go through with it. The thought of becoming a generational ship, of raising and caring for children in hostile space, was not an undertaking I was prepared for. But it did put my naïve assumption that we would be home within the year into perspective.
And so, I had put my fears about procreation and children aside, a problem to be dealt with another day. And then, not forty-eight hours later, Ensign Wildman brought them all back, fully realized. My decision to destroy the array had now not only doomed my crew, but also subjected an unborn baby to the same fate.
As I tapped in my door code, I wondered if I would ever be free of the lingering guilt that seemed to waste at me like a disease, or if I would one day hang by the inadequacies I wore like a velvet noose around my neck.
Would I ever again walk down the halls of my ship and feel the joy of exploration without shame or fear? Or would the judgmental eyes that haunted my steps, watching, waiting, chase me into seclusion? And would it not be better for everyone if they did?
These were questions I could never allow myself to consider for long and I shook myself to break the pessimistic spiral before it could drag me too far under its spell. Despair is a bewitching drug. I had fallen victim to its siren song once before; I could not afford to repeat the experience.
Once inside my quarters, I called for lights and made my way through the living room and into my bedroom. By then, I knew my quarters well enough to navigate them in the dark, but the lights helped to banish the lingering feeling of watchful eyes on the back of my neck.
Wildman could not have known my thoughts on the matter, but I could still feel the twinges of shame when I thought about her terrified face. She had tried to remain brave and professional, but her stumbling words had made it more than clear just how afraid she had been of my answer. I could tell by the tears swimming in her eyes as she explained—just this side of begging me for permission—that Ensign Wildman had walked into my ready room that morning under the impression that the best case scenario was me trying to talk her out of her pregnancy. And the worst…
I had been horrified that anyone could think that I—that anyone would consider—even imagine—
Was I truly so unapproachable? So far removed from my crew as to illicit fear? Was I truly such a terrible captain?
Perhaps.
I had tried to reassure Wildman, to show any amount of joy for her, but I know that I was not able to manage it. Because, in truth, I was not happy for her.
I was terrified. For her. For her child. For us.
A helpless infant. Another mouth to feed. Another person depending on me, demanding a piece of me.
Perhaps it would have been better if I had ordered her to abort the pregnancy, I thought as I stripped off my soiled tank top. What kind of life will this baby have on board a lost starship facing a lifetime’s journey constantly under attack from species like the Kazon?
A life where defense simulations are a necessary fact of life, I answered bitterly. You know it. She knows it.
I paused at the threshold of my bathroom, fist clenched around my limp uniform pants, half wishing my fist was around my throat.
Stop it, Kathryn, I told myself. This line of thinking is helping no one. You are going to support Ensign Wildman and be the picture of confidence. And when she is far enough along to know the gender, you are going to make that child a blanket. And then you are going to throw Wildman a baby shower and gift her an excessively extravagant present replicated from energy this ship does not have but you will scrounge together anyway because that is what she needs. And you will defend that child with everything you have, with your dying breath if that is what is necessary because that is your job. That is what you chose.
So it was.
With newly shored conviction, I let my pants crumple to the floor, turned on the sonic shower, and stepped in.