Caretaker (3 page)

And, all the while, he undercut the notion of his own decency every time Janeway began to think there might be something more to this rebellious boy than anyone realized. If nothing else, he was certainly a complicated young man. She wasn’t sure she wanted complicated for this delicate a mission.

“Your father taught me a great deal,” she said when one of his self-deprecating slurs laid out an overlong silence between them.

“I was his science officer during the Arias Expedition.”

Paris nodded, thoughtfully. “You must be good. My father only accepts the best and the brightest.” Surprisingly, the rancor she’d expected didn’t surface in his voice. Perhaps the worst of it only reached inward instead of out.

She followed on the heels of his reasonability before it could crumble away. “I’m leaving on a mission to find a Maquis ship that disappeared in the Badlands a week ago.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”

The easy certainty of his tone made it sound like he was commenting on the soccer scores, not a trek into the worst uncharted space.

“Really?” she prompted dryly.

He nodded again, more seriously, and even dared stealing a direct look at her face, as if to make sure she was listening. “I’ve never seen a Federation starship that could maneuver through the plasma storms.”

“You’ve never seen Voyager,” she told him, and quietly enjoyed the flash of jealous curiosity that jumped into his eyes. “We’d like you to come along.”

Bitter understanding supplanted whatever interest had started to get a foothold in his brain. “You’d like me to lead you to my former colleagues.” He wasn’t guessing, though she knew he meant it to sound that way, and the half-angry, half-mocking smile that seemed his constant companion finished the job of banishing her respect. “I was only with the Maquis a few weeks before I was captured, Captain. I don’t know where most of their hiding places are.”

“You know the territory better than anyone we’ve got.” He had to know that was true.

Whether he believed it or not, he shrugged off Janeway’s comment the way he might a drink offer during a long and boring dinner party.

“What’s so important about this particular Maquis ship?”

A fair enough question, considering Starfleet hadn’t followed any of the other hit-and-run raiders so far into their own territory.

“My chief of security was on board. Undercover. He was supposed to report in twice during the last six days.” She blinked off an unwelcome memory of the night she’d spent sleepless, waiting for her trusted friend’s last scheduled call. “He didn’t.”

Paris snorted at some personal joke she hadn’t heard. “Maybe it’s just your chief of security who’s disappeared.”

The possibility hurt, but … “Maybe.”

She gave him a moment to study whatever thoughts her proposition awakened in him, eager to shake an answer out of him, leery of frightening him off when he was the only real chance they had.

When she glanced away from the tower of distant mountains to see where his reflections had led him, she found Paris staring at her with surprising intensity. Their eyes met for just that instant, and he turned away with a mortified blush creeping up his cheeks toward his hairline.

Janeway discreetly averted her gaze, pretending not to notice.

“That ship was under the command of another former Starfleet officer named Chakotay,” she said, giving him a chance to catch up with her conversation before forcing him into an answer. “I understand you knew him.”

“That’s right.” He quirked a grin, as though remembering rowdy weekends at the Academy, or a wild first assignment with a brace of other young men.

Janeway watched him carefully. “The two of you didn’t get along too well, I’m told.”

He shrugged, laughing, and tossed his arms out as though absolving himself of all responsibility for anything this Chakotay might have claimed. “Chakotay would tell you he left Starfleet on principle,” Paris explained. “To defend his home colony from the Cardassians.” He folded both hands across his chest in beatific innocence. “I, on the other hand, was forced to resign. He considered me a mercenary—willing to fight for anyone who could pay my bar bills.

Trouble is—” He shrugged again, grinning. “He was right.”

He turned away from her, walking slowly and easily down a sun-dappled path that led nowhere, just like his life. “I have no problem helping you track down my `friends’ in the Maquis, Captain. All I need to know is—” He flicked her a look.

“What’s in it for me?”

It always comes down to that with your kind, she thought. Then, immediately, she had to admit that it wasn’t the goodness of her own heart that had brought her here to barter Paris’s freedom.

Everyone was just a little bit selfish, each in his own way.

People like Paris just made more of an art of it, that was all.

“You help us find that ship,” Janeway told him. “We help you at your next outmate review.”

“Uh-uh.” Paris waggled a finger at her, picking his leg up between them to tap at the anklet. “I get the anklet off first.

Then I help you.”

Janeway had expected this—had arranged for it already, in fact.

If the Rehab Committee wasn’t going to let their prize delinquent go, there was no sense wasting time bartering with Paris. And if Paris was ready to agree to her terms, Janeway equally didn’t want to waste time arguing with a slow-as-dirt committee about something as trivial as a detention anklet that wouldn’t serve its function anyway once they shipped off Earth. Still, all she said to Paris was “I’ll look into it.”

He rolled his eyes as though it made no difference to him, and squinted up toward the mountains as though fascinated by their whiteness.

“Officially, you’d be a Starfleet observer during the mission.”

“Observer?” True insult etched a frown into his young face.

“Hell, I’m the best pilot you could have.”

She shrugged, intentionally echoing him, and watched the fragile surface of his bravado crack and come apart again under the implied disinterest. “You’ll be an observer,” she said, more firmly. “When it’s over, you’re cut loose.”

Paris attempted a wounded sigh. “The story of my life.”

It took everything inside her not to turn her back on him and leave him here to rot in his government-paid paradise surrounded by all the rest of the losers he’d cast his lot with when he first blew off his duty more than a year before. Stepping up to him—so close he jerked a startled look at her and tried to back himself away—she took his chin in one hand and held him in place the way she would a disobedient twelve-year-old. The very childlike terror in his eyes only served to make him look even younger, even less deserving of this sacrifice or her trust.

“If a member of my crew gets hurt because you make a mistake,” she told him, very softly, “you won’t have to worry about an anklet, mister.

I’ll make sure you don’t see daylight again.”

Paris didn’t say anything as Janeway glared at him to drive her point home, didn’t say anything when she released him, didn’t say anything when she turned to walk away.

Who knows? she thought. Maybe he is trainable, after all.

The slender spiral of Space Station Deep Space Nine turned in graceful pirouette against the unpopulated backdrop of open space. It made a strange yet lovely sight—unlike any other structure Starfleet recognized as an orbital space station, but still as pretty and functional as her alien architects could make her. If she had had anything beneath her to orbit, she might not even look so weirdly displaced, although Paris doubted that.

Somewhere within a few AUs of Deep Space Nine’s northern elliptic, a scarred and war-battered world called Bajor supposedly marked the path originally followed by this wayward station. Paris remembered hearing rumblings two years ago about the stable wormhole accidentally discovered in this sector, and about DS9’s consequent relocation to the mouth of that anomaly.

He’d discounted it all as sensationalist newsnet drivel. Shows what I know. Slouching farther down in his seat, he braced his heels against the edge of his inactive copilot’s helm and watched the station draw closer through the V of his upraised knees.

It felt odd, sitting again in a Starfleet shuttle without guards at either shoulder or manacles on his hands. The memory of that last flight—and his last few hours inside a Starfleet uniform—brought heat into his cheeks so painfully, he thought he’d cry. He fought off the impulse with the skill of much practice. No sense mourning the past.

What’s done is done, and you can’t undo it, and if the last miserable year of his life didn’t prove that, nothing else did. Be thankful for whatever bit of reprieve you can buy, he told himself. If, in his case, this amounted to little more than a sterile, rankless uniform, a token position under a hostile commander, and the chance to improve his status from imprisoned Starfleet traitor bum to simple free-ranging civilian bum, then it was already better than he knew he deserved.

It would have been nice to be the pilot who first slipped a starship through that wormhole, though.

Shifting his duffel to a more comfortable position across his lap, Paris slid a look toward the lieutenant who had quietly piloted them ever since they parted company with the larger crew transport seven hours ago. She was small and pleasantly trim, like most Betazoid women Paris had seen, with the same high brow and huge, chocolate eyes that had slain human men since their races first crossed paths. He’d tried talking to her when they first set out. Nothing serious, of course—just the quick, light prattle that he knew he did so well.

After all, Paris was acutely aware that Janeway might have told this Betazoid things that he would rather not have brought up when he had nowhere to run to. By usurping the onus of initiating conversation, Paris knew he also earned the right to keep the subjects impersonal, amusing, and trivial, and he did his best to keep them that way for the entirety of the journey. Stadi played along gamely enough. She smiled, she laughed, she answered his coy feints and thrusts with brief, well-aimed ripostes, and Paris allowed her to score just enough points to keep her interested in the wordplay, not interested in him.

“Stadi,” he said now, alerted to a shift in her mood by the length of the silence spread between them during his study of the station, “you’re changing my mind about Betazoids.”

She twitched one eyebrow upward, and dipped a self-satisfied nod.

“Good.”

Paris pulled his feet back to the floor to sit upright. “It wasn’t a compliment,” he assured her. “Until today, I always considered your people to be warm and sensual. …”

This time, the little glimmer of condescending humor he’d been nurturing in her the whole trip flickered into life again.

“I can be warm and sensual.”

“Just not to me.”

She turned the full force of her playful annoyance on him. “Do you always fly at women at warp speed, Mr. Paris?”

Paris smiled, giving both of them a point with his reply. “Only when they’re in visual range.”

It killed the conversation again, but at a point more to Paris’s liking. Sitting back in his seat, he felt the impulse thrusters take their velocity down to half, and watched Stadi gently shift the shuttle’s approach without pointing out the half-dozen ways she could have done things faster, better, more smoothly. I’m an observer, after all. The ultimate in look-but-don’t-touch technology.

“That’s our ship,” Stadi said abruptly. The tight excitement in her voice was distinct, contagious, drawing Paris’s attention where she pointed even though he hadn’t meant to look. “That’s Voyager.”

At first, he had trouble locating the ship amid the clutter of alien and Federation vessels daisy-chained around the points of the station’s docking pylons. Then his wondering eye caught on the Starfleet emblem that graced the hull of a small, sleek ship that hung poised with her nose kissing the uppermost docking bay.

Almost at once, he knew this must be what Starfleet meant to send after the Maquis. Janeway had told him so little about the ship, he didn’t really know what to expect, but all he could think now was that this beauty was different from any other starship he’d seen. A slim predator, as swift and tireless as a cheetah.

“Intrepid-class,” Stadi volunteered as she glided them closer.

“Sustainable cruise velocity of warp factor nine point nine-seven-five.

Fifteen decks, crew complement of one hundred forty-one, bioneural circuitry—” Paris glanced a question at her. “Bioneural?”

The Betazoid nodded, almost absently. “Some of the traditional circuitry has been replaced with gel packs that contain synthetic neural cells. They organize information more efficiently, speed up response time.” The smile she flashed him was almost wicked with delight. “Want to take a closer look?”

Paris was certain he would have said yes, but Stadi didn’t wait for his answer. Delicate fingers dancing across her helm, she swept them into a smooth arc lifting them over the top of the station and into an intimate flyby across Voyager’s fine-tooled bow, along her flanks, beneath the flash of her belly. Paris drank in every promising line of that magnificent ship with a jealousy that made him both angry and afraid. The low-slung warp nacelles on their short, sturdy pylons hinted at a power that no ship before her had ever possessed, and the smooth blending of her primary and secondary hulls looked almost aerodynamic compared with the blissfully angelic craft who made up her direct ancestors. Paris wanted to fly her—wanted to serve on her—wanted to deserve her in a way he’d sacrificed forever when he drummed himself out of Starfleet on Caldik Prime. If someone had told him then that a few hours of stupid fear would eat all the years of his life worth living, he would have laughed and offered them another beer.

And now…

Now, he rode in silence behind a darkened panel, lusting after an existence no longer within his reach, an eternal observer in the whirlpool of his life as it dragged him ever downward, into nothing.

It was like being locked out of the circus. Everybody else hurried off into their bright and busy futures, while Paris got left behind like their empty houses, not even close enough to see the parade.