Chapter Text
AR-558, Alpha Quadrant
Trooper Patrick Reese watched as soldiers—soldiers who looked like they were barely past boot camp—started transporting in, each one chasing away the night for a beat in the shine of blue and silver light.
What a joke.
"Children," he said, aiming the word at Captain Sisko.
"Not for long," Sisko said. His dark eyes turned to look at Reese. "Ready?"
Reese drew the Jem’Hadar blade, then threw it into the ground. It bit deep into the muck and soil of the murderous dirtball of a planet.
"Let’s go," he said. He never wanted to see this place again. He hoped it was worth it, but couldn’t imagine it ever would be.
"Sisko to Defiant. Three to beam up."
A moment later, the transporter had him.
Less than an hour after that, he and the rest of the few survivors had been transferred to the USS Veracruz. He had his own room, his own bed, and he stood in the sonic shower, arms braced against either side, running a second cycle but feeling like he’d never be clean again.
It wasn’t just the dirt. It was the blood.
And the memories.
*
Reese tugged on a clean undershirt and shorts and sat at the end of the bed. Time blurred. His stomach growled, but he didn’t do anything about it. His eyes felt heavy and gritty, but the thought of lying down, of getting into the bed…
Sleep might mean dreams.
So he sat.
"Smythe to Reese."
He sat. When his combadge chirped a moment later, he tapped it and snapped, "What?"
"Trooper Reese?" The voice that followed was more hesitant than before.
"Yes." He managed something closer to neutral this time.
"You have a call. I’m routing it to the terminal in your quarters."
Reese tapped the combadge, shutting down the connection, and looked across the small room to the even smaller desk where a personal terminal blinked to life.
Go away, he thought. He sat. But the terminal chimed. Then chimed again.
He stood up. Crossing the room felt like walking through mud, and he sank into the chair and hit the activation button.
After a beat of connection across the Starfleet Subspace Network, a man’s face appeared. He looked weak to Reese—at a glance he knew the man’s operations gold meant engineering, not security—and he had no idea who the fuck he was. But he was a lieutenant.
The shreds of his training held, and Reese said, "Yes?"
"Trooper P-Patrick Reese?" the man said, with a hint of a stutter. "My name is Reg Barclay. I’m… I’m told you know Voyager’s chief engineer… Uh, Lieutenant H-Honigsberg?" Every word the engineer spoke seemed to come with less conviction than the word before, like meeting Reese’s gaze was sucking the man’s courage dry.
Alex.
If this tissue-paper lieutenant was about to tell him Alex was dead…
"I do," Reese said, grinding out the words. "Why?"
"I-I’m part of Project P-Pathfinder…"
"Right." Reese knew the project—and come to think of it, maybe the man’s name was familiar after all—and he’d sent them a letter to forward on to Alex, months ago, before his assignment to the dirt ball. But one of the first things he’d checked when he got on board was whether or not there’d been anything from Alex—there had—but he learned the option to reply was gone. "I got some letters from Alex, but it said the connection got fucked."
"Um… well, no, it…" The man spluttered a bit. "Or, well… we…"
"Lieutenant," Reese said, grinding his teeth. "I was told I’d have off-duty time. You’re interrupting it. What do you need?"
"I need another letter!" Barclay spat out the words. "We’ve… we think we c-can… re-establish contact with Voyager." He swallowed. "And… they should be able to reply. Every th-thirty days."
Reese stared at the man on the screen for a second. Barclay twitched.
"I’ll have it to you in an hour," Reese said, and cut the connection.
He took a breath, tapped the console again, and said, "Computer. Record a letter for Lieutenant Alexander Honigsberg."
"Recording."
"Hi Alex," Reese said, looking at the screen.
*
USS Voyager, Delta Quadrant
Alexander Honigsberg brightened at the sight of Celes Tal and Eru speaking with Chief Basil McMinn, all three behind the serving area of the Mess Hall, and leaned against the counter. "This looks like a meeting that could result in something delicious," he said. "So I’m already endorsing it."
McMinn—Voyager’s quartermaster, and one of the most poised men Honigsberg had ever met—gave him a tiny little twist of the lips for the joke, but neither confirmed nor denied his assertions.
"We’re just going over the the cargo bay and garden surpluses, Lieutenant," Celes said, far more forthcoming. "You’re up early—having breakfast with Seven today?"
"Actually, no," Honigsberg said. "Seven’s got class today with Cing’ta, so our jam party is delayed a couple of days. I’m a free agent and very open to suggestions." He eyed Eru. "Thought I definitely want some Jeta blend, if you’ve got some of your daughter’s elixir handy."
"It’s in the first urn," Eru said, nodding to the first of two larger dispensers the Mess Hall often set up for people to serve themselves, which Honigsberg was happy to do, picking up a mug.
"As for breakfast options," Celes said. "We’ve got—"
"Lieutenant Honigsberg, report to Astrometrics."
Seven of Nine was apparently not in class yet. Honigsberg blinked. "It’s like she enjoys doing that," he said. Eru and McMinn gave him amused glances. "Ordering around officers, I mean."
"She wouldn’t call unless it was important," Celes said, handing him one of the lids for his mug of tea.
"I’ll be back later," Honigsberg said, snapping the magnetic lid in place and taking his tea with him to the door.
In Astrometrics, he found he’d not been the only one summoned—or at least, he didn’t imagine Cing’ta usually showed up a sleeveless black shirt and loose black trousers, nor Lieutenant Taitt in her scarlet hair-wrap, though she was in uniform trousers and her uniform undershirt. The big Bolian was already working at one panel, and he spotted Billy Telfer working at the far end—likely he’d been here on the night shift. Taitt stood beside Seven of Nine at the main controls.
She was in her cadet uniform.
"I thought you had class," Honigsberg said, announcing his arrival.
"Something more important has occurred," Seven of Nine said.
"I got what I think might be a message from home," Telfer said.
Honigsberg put his mug down on the small desk by the doorway and headed up to join Seven and Taitt.
"Billy’s right," Taitt said.
"Through the new transceiver updates?" Honigsberg said. They’d brought them online only recently, and while they were up to the specs Project Pathfinder had last asked them to attempt in the final datastream they’d received through Marconi, they hadn’t included much detail about the rest of the plan.
War tended to make Admirals classify things even more than normal, especially when sending signals across the galaxy.
"That is correct," Seven of Nine said. "However, the signal is diffuse."
"Because they missed," Taitt said.
It took Honigsberg a second to catch on. "Oh, damn, of course they did…"
"We’re about ten thousand light years from where they expected us to be," Cing’ta said.
"Luckily, we took a very direct route," Taitt said, and Honigsberg looked up at the data across the holographic display, realizing what she meant.
They signal was aimed past them.
He tapped into the third console and brought up the data. "Reconstructing the message won’t be easy with this level of dispersion, but…" He turned and cracked a grin at Taitt. "Not impossible—do we know if Cir is back on his feet?"
"Crewman Cir has been returned to light duty," Seven of Nine said. "I already transferred what we’ve reconstructed to the Life Sciences Lab."
"All right," Honigsberg said, pushing up his sleeves. "I’ll see what I can do about weeding out the noise from Voyager’s own power signals—I assume that’s why I was summoned?" The transceiver array had been designed to be as isolated and sensitive as possible, and doing so had leaned heavily on his knowledge of Enaran power reclamation effects—any waste energy would interfere with signal quality—but with as broad and untargeted a signal as this, all of Voyager’s power systems would have impacted the signal.
"Correct." Seven didn’t look up from her own efforts. "Lieutenant Lan is co-ordinating from the Bridge."
"And I’ve got the Cloud system giving us a hand," Cing’ta said. "Between me and Cir and Sakan, it has a lot of algorithms for restoring missing packets."
Hongisberg nodded. Seven had assembled the dream team. Zero surprise there. He got to work.
*
At the chime, Cavit put down the book he was reading aloud to his husband—one of Jeff’s great-uncle’s books, a locked-door mystery that had been the start of the man’s literary career as one of Earth’s whodunnit masters—and headed to the door.
Fitzgerald, seated comfortably on the couch, turned to watch, but also took the opportunity to raise and lower his left arm a few extra times. They’d completed his physiotherapy for the morning, and while he knew full well Kes and Emmett had given him a perfectly tailored schedule for his recovery, he also knew they knew he’d push it, and assumed that had been factored into what they’d sent him.
Unfortunately, Aaron didn’t buy that line of logic, so he tended to sneak it in where he could.
"Ro, hi. Come on in."
Fitzgerald managed to crane his neck enough to see their acting Captain step in.
"Forgive me if I don’t get up," he said, with a wide grin.
"As you can see, his particular sense of humour has recovered," Cavit said. "Want some coffee?"
"No, I won’t stay," Ro said, shaking her head. "But there’s some news I didn’t want to delay."
"Have a seat," Cavit said, returning to the couch, and putting his arm back around Fitzgerald’s shoulder.
As much as Fitzgerald was beyond frustrated at the snail’s pace recovery he was undergoing—it absolutely didn’t help that he understood every facet of why it had to be slow, either—he couldn’t deny how nice it felt to have Aaron’s arm around him, and how much having nothing else on their of their plates was making this journey feel at least a little more tolerable.
Ro took the chair opposite them, and got right to it, like she always did.
"We got a message from Pathfinder," she said.
"From Starfleet," Fitzgerald said, smiling.
"The new transceiver?" Cavit said.
Ro nodded. "It took us a couple of days to put it into a readable format—honestly, it was dumb luck we managed to be in the path of the signal," she spread her hands. "They were aiming it roughly ten thousand light years behind us."
Cavit groaned. "Of course they were."
"But we managed to recover the data, and they’ll send more next month."
"Next month?" Fitzgerald said. His heart tripped up a few beats, and he smiled at Aaron, seeing the same joy in his husband’s beautiful blue eyes. He turned back to Ro. "They can do it again?"
"They're using a cyclic pulsar to amplify signals from the MIDAS array—apparently, MIDAS was green-lit and prioritized by Admiral Fitzgerald—but the cycle only peaks every thirty two days—they sent this one two days ago, so we’ve got thirty days to get ready to reply."
"Reply?" Cavit’s breath grew soft.
"The first time might be tricky—they’re still going to aim in the wrong direction next month, but Seven has an idea she thinks will work—and once we do that, they’ll know where we are for the month after." Ro wasn’t one for effusive emotionality, Fitzgerald knew, but she was smiling now. "The short version is, for about seventeen hours after we get a packet through Pathfinder, we’ll be able to reply—there’ll be data limits, but we can update them on our journey, write letters…" She took a breath. "Cir and Cing’ta are sending the various letters to your consoles right now. You both have messages from home."
"Thank you, Ro," Cavit said.
She nodded, and then rose, then paused, glancing at Fitzgerald. "Don’t get up. I’ll see myself out."
He was still thunderstruck by the time the door closed.
"Did she just—?" He said, once he recovered his voice.
"That’s a really good look on you," Cavit said, grinning that boy-scout grin of his at him.
*
Honigsberg sat down at his desk, and called up his messages, hoping—.
The computer listed one message downloaded from the Project Pathfinder packet, and the identity of the sender was…
"Reese," Honigsberg pressed a hand against his goatee. He’d had one message from the man with Marconi—including the best of possible news regarding Honigsberg’s own admission of love: that it was returned—and then Reese had been assigned somewhere classified.
He’s okay.
He’d wanted to believe that, of course, but he’d had doubts. The man was a soldier. The Federation was at war.
He reached out and tapped the message.
"Hi Alex," Reese said, with a wan, barely-there smile that didn’t reach his eyes in the slightest. He wasn’t in uniform—wearing only an undershirt, as far as Honigsberg could tell—and everything about him seemed… off.
It only got worse from there.