Caretaker (2 page)

“I’ve heard Starfleet’s commissioned a new Intrepid-class ship,” Torres remarked suddenly. As though she knew she ought to say something in response to Chakotay’s communication, but didn’t know quite what.

“With the bioneural circuitry to maneuver through plasma storms …” she added.

The smoke was spilling out of a grate beneath the atmosphere controls, weirdly lit from inside by both emergency flashers and loose flame.

Chakotay pulled the grate open with a great puff of sooty air, and knelt to reach under the damaged panel. “We’ll find a new place to hide,” he remarked to Torres.

She was silent for a moment, and he used that time to find the trigger for the automatic fire controls and force it into the Active position with his thumb. Halon swirled around him in a chilling blast, and he jerked his arm back into the open to let the gas do its work.

“You ever think about what’ll happen if they catch us?” Torres asked as he was settling the grate back into its tracks. The controls reported that function had been marginalized, but nothing was in danger of failing.

Chakotay added replacement of the atmospherics to the mental checklist of impossible repairs he already intended to hand the technicians at the hideout, and turned to decide which hopeless task to take up next.

“My great-grandfather had a poktoy,” he said to Torres as he prowled between the panels. At her dubious scowl, he smiled and clarified, “A saying, that he passed on to my grandfather, who passed it to my father, who passed it to me.

`Coya anochta zab.”” The reclamation system had been fused in one of the countless torpedo hits, too ruined for him to even read the controls. He abandoned it, and moved on. “`Don’t look back.”” Torres almost smiled, and Chakotay had to return her flash of grim humor when he considered how appropriate those words were to most of their battles anymore. Take it where you can get it, he chided himself. Humor is hard to come by, remember? Small wonder why.

“Curious …”

Tuvok’s voice floated up from the weapons console as though the Vulcan didn’t even realize he’d spoken. Chakotay watched as long, dark hands played across the controls, trying to recapture something no one but a Vulcan would probably even have seen.

Apparently satisfied with what he found, Tuvok lifted an eyebrow and traced a series of readings with his eyes. “We have just passed through some kind of coherent tetryon beam.”

Chakotay’s heart thumped against his lungs. If the Cardassians have some new weaponry… He shook the thought away, unwilling to think of that just now. “Source?” he asked as he climbed his way back to the front of the bridge.

Tuvok consulted his readings once more. “Unknown.” As Chakotay squeezed in behind him, Torres as close on his heels as she could be without actually touching him, the Vulcan pointed to something incomprehensible among his readouts. “Now there appears to be a massive displacement wave moving toward us.”

Chakotay shot a look out the viewscreen, seeing nothing but plasma turmoil, then turned in frustration to the swarm of scientific figures and the blur of formless white steadily obscuring them as it flowed onto the screen. “Another storm?”

Tuvok shook his head. “It is not a plasma phenomenon. The computer is unable to identify it.”

“Put it onscreen.”

The plasma storm swirling and raging beyond the forward viewscreen rippled and bled, peeling away from itself as the image projected there shifted to a new angle off the rear of the little craft. Chakotay felt his throat tighten at the thick wall of coruscating destruction that chewed its way through the storm behind them.

“At current speeds,” Tuvok reported placidly, “it is going to intercept us in less than thirty seconds.”

And eat us alive. Chakotay swung away from the weapons console to throw himself at the helm. “Anything left in those impulse generators, B’Elanna?” he called back to Torres as he slipped into the seat.

She already struggled with her damaged equipment, growling profanities at whatever her console told her. “We’ll find out.”

“It is still exceeding our speed,” Tuvok interjected.

Chakotay didn’t bother acknowledging. “Maximum power.”

“You’ve got it,” Torres replied.

But even as the craft lurched forward, he could feel the wave roiling toward them—like the stinging kiss of too-near fire, or the brush of an owl’s wing as it dove toward someone’s death in the night. Not like this, he prayed. After everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve dreamed, please don’t let us lose our lives like this!

“The wave is continuing to accelerate.” A rhythmic pinging underscored the Vulcan’s deep voice as he counted off the seconds. “It will intercept us in eight seconds … five …”

Chakotay locked his feet around the chair’s base again, his hands frozen on the panel, but unable to command any more speed from the ruined craft.

Not like this!

Sirens first, then screams, then the groan of tortured metal. He clenched his teeth, wished he could close his ears, damning the Federation for their ill-thought treaty, damning the Cardassians for chasing them in here, damning whatever explosion of nature now chased them, slammed them, clawed them, ripped them open like a rotten fish until the ship streamed its viscera a molecule wide into forever, into nowhere, into nothingNot like this not like this not like—!

“Captain Kathryn Janeway, this is Auckland Control. You are now cleared for landing at Federation Penal Settlement, Landing Pad Three.”

Blinking her attention back to the present, Janeway reached for the comm toggle with no conscious decision to do so, directed by instinct and habit when fatigue wouldn’t allow her much else to go on. “Janeway to Auckland Control, roger. Landing approach at one-three-one-mark-seven.”

“Roger, Janeway,” the bright New Zealand voice on the other end of the channel replied. “Enjoy your stay.”

She set about the business of guiding her slim shuttle past the island’s rugged mountains without dignifying the Kiwi’s sarcasm with a reply.

The sheer greenness of New Zealand’s North Island reached up through the clean ocean air to hug Janeway’s heart with warmth.

As temperate and mild a place as San Francisco was, it was still penciled on the coastline in shades of minty gray. Fog and rock and juniper, not mountains, trees and snow like the wild panorama galloping below her. It seemed a shame to waste such beauty on felons. No matter how hard she tried to tell herself that even criminals were humans, deserving of certain dignities and rights, she couldn’t quite divest herself of the belief that incarceration for serious crimes should be unpleasant and dull.

Why take up land that could be added to New Zealand’s magnificent National Parks system when Alcatraz still crouched in the midst of San Francisco Bay, useless to everybody but tourists and seagulls? After all, the felons sunning themselves on Auckland’s beaches right now should be contemplating how badly they never wanted to end up in prison again, not budgeting time for another stint here as though planning some kind of expense-paid vacation.

That isn’t fair, she scolded herself. They make them work here, and rehabilitation facilities like this enjoy a much higher success rate than the old-style punishment systems. Still, a deeper part of her chafed at the idea of cutting anyone else slack when she allowed so little room for error in herself.

The penal settlement accepted her clearance code without question, and she allowed the penitentiary’s flight computer to take the shuttle’s controls for the final approach and touchdown.

It felt good, actually, to sit back—even for a few minutes—and rest her brain from the endless onslaught of decisions it had been forced to make over the last few days. Mark, bless him, had been as supportive as a civilian lovemate could be, never questioning the hours she spent away from him (even when they were together), never demanding that he be more important than the things that Starfleet threw in front of her to reconcile.

Even when Bear had gotten sick, poor angel, Mark had taken her to the vet without being asked, letting the big dog ride the whole way with her head in his lap, even though it meant dun-colored hairs on his trousers for the rest of the week. Janeway knew how much he hated dealing with dog hair.

Why does everything come down at once? she asked herself with a weary sigh. A part of her still hadn’t forgiven herself for handing Bear over to the kennel this morning, still with no idea why the dog had suddenly swelled by nearly seven kilos and fallen into a persistent lazy torpor. If anything happens to her while I’m gone, I’ll hate myself.

And if anything happened to her wayward security officer because she couldn’t get Voyager out of port just one day earlier, she’d hate herself for that, too. There was just no way of winning this one.

The comp at the main gate was expecting her. Walking across the bright, open field separating the two aircraft permanently assigned to this settlement from the actual facility that housed the detainees, Janeway marveled again at the sweetness of the air, the beauty of the cerulean sky. I need a vacation, she decided. Bad timing, that. She passed inside the gates on voiceprint and retinal scan only, and wasn’t even past the second barrier before the security system informed her, “Detainee Thomas E. Paris is in the motor fleet repair bay. Would you like a security car to take you there?”

“No,” she told it. “I’d rather walk.”

It neither thanked her nor signed off; she left the gate behind without caring.

For all that they couldn’t have many visitors to the penal settlement, the detainees she passed didn’t seem particularly interested in her arrival. She couldn’t imagine that they’d known she’d be coming. More likely, the arrival of a Starfleet officer meant nothing but trouble for somebody within this facility, and nobody particularly wanted to be that somebody.

Just as well. She wasn’t in the mood to talk right now, least of all to anyone who couldn’t figure out how to keep themselves out of serious trouble, much less rescue a stubborn friend from the fire.

She found Paris on the pavement outside the repair bay, the only detainee in sight—and even then, only half so. His upper torso was hidden beneath some long, squat piece of equipment with a power coil the size of an asteroid, his shirt flung carelessly over the machine’s control console and a plasma welder flashing arrhythmically from somewhere out of sight beside him. Janeway took in the details of his assignment—the level of equipment he was allowed to use without supervision, the apparent mobility of the machine he worked to repair—and noted to herself that even the electronic anklet locked to his right foot couldn’t stop him from fleeing the island if he chose to at this moment. It could find him, wherever he fled, but it couldn’t prevent his escape.

The fact that he was still here said something about either his commitment to his own rehab, or his intelligence. She didn’t know him well enough yet to determine which it was.

Taking a breath to clear her thoughts and school the dislike from her features, she clasped her hands loosely behind her back.

“Tom Paris?” She summoned him as though only just coming up on the scene, seeing no need to surrender any advantage she didn’t have to.

Not to this kid. Not knowing the kind of stock he came from.

The flailing light under the machinery’s belly died abruptly, leaving a smear of darkness across her vision as an echo of its brightness.

Paris pushed himself out from under with a smoothness that betrayed the gliding board he must have had in place under his back, and flicked up the visor that hid his eyes as though lifting an extremely chic and expensive pair of sunglasses. Sweat sheened down the middle of his chest and across the flat plane of his stomach, and Janeway noted that his pale skin glowed just a bit too pinkly below his collar line and above his cuffs. Not used to New Zealand’s bright winter sun, then, and too proud to move himself inside when the daylight threatened to burn. That indicated a special type of stupidity, reserved for young men who felt they had something to prove but hadn’t a clue what it was.

Very like the description she’d been given before flying down to New Zealand, and not at all like his father.

“Kathryn Janeway,” she identified herself. She didn’t offer her hand, and he gave no sign that he expected it. “I served with your father on the Al-Batani. I wonder if we could go somewhere and talk.”

An odd little smile that seemed to go deeper than it should ghosted onto his face at the mention of his father. Janeway wondered what sort of thoughts moved behind an expression like that “About what?” Paris asked her, still stretched full-length on the gliding board.

“About a job we’d like you to do for us.”

He laughed—a laugh as odd and light as his smile—and tossed a hand toward the machine above him. “I’m already doing a `job,’” he explained with mock sincerity. “For the Federation.”

Attitude looking for a place to happen. Janeway had been warned, but it didn’t make her like it any more. Still, a dozen years of service had taught her well how to temper her tone and expression. “I’ve been told the Rehab Committee is very pleased with your work. They’ve given me their approval to discuss this matter with you.”

Paris studied her with eyes that held a hint of an intellect far keener than his history implied. Then he shrugged, as though dismissing everything he’d just allowed himself to think, and bounced to his feet with an easy grace that spoke volumes about the training and life he’d known before this. He faced her with arms spread, that infuriating grin laid out between them like a shield. “Then I guess I’m yours.”

Only if I decide I want you, Janeway thought back at him, her face as cool and stem as possible. And then only if I decide I need you. She didn’t have time to waste on him otherwise.

A park. The damn penal facility had a park. Janeway walked with Paris between the full, green trees, seething at the lovely solitude of the place amid these people who seemed, by temperament, ill-suited to appreciate it. Still, it was Paris who slowed to pluck an errant scrap of plastic off the walkway—Paris who detoured them around a bob of oblivious pigeons so that their conversation wouldn’t disrupt the birds.