by Greg Cox
A wave of weariness washed over her. There was too much to worry about and not enough hours in the day. Seventy-five years to home, she thought. The sheer enormity of her task crashed down on her spirits. She could never truly rest, she realized, until she had safely delivered the crew back to the lives and loved ones they had lost, but there was such a long, long way to go. . . .
“Captain,” Chakotay said. For a second, she had forgotten he was in the room. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said, shaking off the malaise that had briefly descended on her. “My mind was wandering, I guess.” She smiled ruefully. “Not unlike Ensign Tukwila and the others.”
She leaned forward to address him, resting her elbows on the top of her desk. “Your point is well taken, Commander. Too much shore leave can be a dangerous thing. For now, however, I’m inclined to take a wait-and-see attitude toward the situation. The crew seems to be enjoying this temporary respite from our long trip home. The last thing I want to do is overreact and spoil their vacation. Nor do we want to offend the Ryol; they can hardly be blamed if their generosity is undercutting the crew’s discipline. You and I should keep an eye on things, though.”
“I agree,” Chakotay said. “I just wanted you to be aware of the problem.” He rose from his seat and walked toward the exit. As the door slid open, he turned and looked at Janeway once more. “Are you sure you’re okay, Captain?” he asked. “No offense intended, but you seemed to fade away there for a moment.”
She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Thanks for asking, but it’s nothing you need to worry about. I’m just tired.”
Very tired, she thought.
CHAPTER
9
ANTIMATTER OR NO ANTIMATTER, SOME JOBS COULDN’T wait. Starfleet regulations required that the impulse engines be regularly inspected for routine wear and tear, and B’Elanna Torres had no intention of letting her curiosity get in the way of proper care and maintenance for the engines, not while she was the chief engineer. Ryolanov—and that annoyingly secretive beach—would just have to wait.
Torres stood on a metallic gray catwalk overlooking the fusion generators in the starboard wing. Three armored spheres, each approximately six meters in diameter, were linked in sequence. Each sphere was constructed of eight layers of dispersion-strengthened hafnium excelinide and was designed to contain the energy released in a conventional proton-proton fusion reaction. As usual, Torres prayed fervently that nothing unfixable turned up during the inspection. In theory, impulse reaction chambers such as the spheres below should be replaced completely every 8,500 flight hours, a massive undertaking that generally required the full resources of an active starbase. Given that the nearest Federation starbase was nearly a lifetime away, Torres had little choice but to tend to her engines like a mother hen and hope they lasted as long as possible.
As she looked on, Ensign Erin Jourdan climbed inside the forward sphere to inspect its inner lining for cracks and abrasions. Jourdan was a blonde pale-skinned humanoid fresh out of Starfleet Academy. Torres noticed that Jourdan walked with a slight limp; she recalled that the ensign had sprained her ankle during some ridiculous accident on the planet’s surface.
While Jourdan inspected the impulse reaction chamber from the inside, Torres checked the readouts provided by the ship’s internal monitoring system. The IPS command coordinator was performing a level-three diagnostic when a muffled cry of alarm came from the interior of the IRC. “Erin?” Torres called out.
The scream grew louder, full of fear and agony. Adrenaline rushed through Torres’s body. Dropping her padd, she leaped off the catwalk onto the top of the IRC. The armored plating rung harshly as her boots connected with the huge metal sphere, almost drowning out the sound of Jourdan’s cries. What’s happening, she wondered. Had some idiot been stupid enough to initiate a fusion reaction while Jourdan was inside the IRC? No, she realized, that would have incinerated Jourdan instantly, leaving no one to scream. Yanking open the hatch, she thrust her head into the opening that the young ensign had climbed through to enter the chamber. Her eyes instantly took in the situation.
Ensign Jourdan was sprawled at the bottom of the sphere, clutching her leg. A white porcelain glaze, which Torres knew to be crystallized gulium fluoride, covered the curving inner wall of the chamber, while a cascade of icy slush poured out of an open vent several centimeters above Jourdan’s head. The semi-frozen liquid steamed as it came into contact with the woman. That was pure deuterium, Torres knew, supercooled to at least fourteen degrees Kelvin. Jourdan thrashed spasmodically in a steaming puddle of slush, her shrieks of anguish echoing off the walls of the chamber.
“Damn it,” Torres snarled. Someone had carelessly forgotten to flush out the fuel injection conduits before today’s planned inspection. When Jourdan opened the vents to observe the seal, the frigid slush must have coming gushing into the chamber, knocking her to the floor of the IRC and, almost literally, freezing her flesh and bones. “Hold on!” she shouted, climbing down the ladder Jourdan had attached to the side of the chamber. She tried to stay clear of the deuterium spray. An icy fog filled the IRC, sapping her strength and obscuring her vision. “Grab my hand!” she yelled, reaching out for the endangered ensign while she kept her other hand on the ladder.
“I can’t!” Jourdan cried. “I can’t move my legs!” The puddle expanded, swallowing more of Jourdan. She could barely keep her face above the water. “Oh my god, help me! It’s so cold!”
“I’m trying!” Torres shouted. She climbed lower on the ladder, leaning out as far as she could reach. Spray from the gushing fuel vents splashed against her arm. Torres had to bite down on her lip to keep from screaming. The slush was so cold it burned.
She could barely see Jourdan through the swirling mist now. Her outstretched fingers sought out the origin of the other woman’s desperate cries, but grasped only the fog. “Reach for me!” she shouted. “Grab my hand!”
Torres heard a frantic splash beneath her, then felt five cold fingers brush against hers. Jourdan’s fingers felt like ice. They were cold and brittle and cracked loudly as Torres squeezed them. The fingers began to slip away, but Torres reached out and grabbed Jourdan by the wrist. Still hanging on to the ladder, she began to pull the other woman out of the slush. Her energy exhausted, Jourdan was dead weight; for once, Torres felt grateful for the strength she had inherited from her Klingon ancestors. A normal human would have never managed to drag Jourdan up the ladder and out of the reaction chamber.
Not until they were both safely collapsed on top of the IRC, with the hatch thrown shut behind them, did Torres inspect her own wounds. Her right arm looked badly frostbitten; the exposed flesh was blue and lifeless. She used her other hand to activate her commbadge. “Torres here.” She gasped, breathing heavily. “Two for Sickbay.”
Just wait until I get my hands, she thought, on the moron who forgot to flush out the system!
• • •
The sun was shining, a cool breeze was blowing, and Laazia was nowhere in sight. Tom Paris felt that all was right with the world. Not that he minded the Elder’s daughter’s company all that much, but, as undeniably appealing as Laazia was, Paris didn’t want to get into any more trouble with Naxor and/or the captain. For now he was content to stretch out on an isolated strip of beach and bake in the sun next to his buddy Harry. “Life doesn’t get much better than this,” he declared. “Isn’t that right, Harry? Harry?”
A snore was his friend’s only reply. Paris chuckled. He couldn’t blame Harry for snoozing. Ryolanov seemed specially designed to encourage goofing off. Too bad it’s so far off the beaten track, he thought. The Ryol could make a fortune in the tourist trade. He didn’t care what the holodeck dealers said; there was still nothing like the real thing.
And, for now, they pretty much had the whole place to themselves. No doubt there were plenty of visitors from Voyager mingling with Ryol on the sands closer to the city, but he and Harry had, in hopes of staying out of trouble, d
eliberately hiked until they were out of sight of the other swimmers and sunbathers. Rolling dunes of pebbly black sand, interspersed with tufts of emerald foliage, obscured his view of the Ryol city with all its opportunities for ghastly social blunders. This was better, he thought. Nothing but peace and quiet all around.
He rolled over onto his back. One of the nicer aspects of this beach, he’d discovered, was that the polished black granules did not stick to your skin the way ordinary sand did, thus eradicating the need for beach towels. The tiny pellets rolled and shifted beneath him, adjusting themselves to the contours of his body. He blinked his eyes against the bright crimson sunlight.
“Tom! Harry!”
Raising his hand to shield his eyes, Paris spotted two figures approaching. One of the figures was unmistakably female; for a second, he feared that Laazia had caught up with him already. Then he noted the long black hair, quite unlike Laazia’s short golden down, and recognized the woman calling his name.
It was Susan Tukwila, very much out of uniform. A typically emaciated neffaler trailed behind her, lugging a large wicker basket. Judging from the exhausted expression on the creature’s face, the basket was full of something heavy. Paris gave the neffaler only a moment’s glance. Instead his eyes widened as Tukwila grew nearer. He nudged Kim with his elbow. “Wake up, Harry,” he whispered. “You don’t want to miss this.”
“Huh?” Kim said. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What did you do that for? I was having the greatest dream,” he grumbled sleepily.
“Look up,” Paris said.
Kim did. “Oh my goodness,” he whispered. “I think I’m still dreaming.”
The object of their rapt attention came strolling across the beach, then sank down onto the black sand between them. Paris couldn’t believe his eyes. While both he and Harry had donned fairly traditional bathing trunks for their trip to the beach, Susan Tukwila wore the embroidered vest and short loincloth that the Ryol themselves seemed accustomed to. Paris decided she had never looked better.
“Going native?” he asked her. Catching up with Tukwila, the neffaler deposited the picnic basket on the sand behind the three humans. His mission accomplished, the monkeylike creature took a moment to rest in the shade of the basket.
“And why not?” Susan Tukwila responded defiantly. Paris was surprised by the heat in her voice. “Anything’s better than slaving away for that humorless stick-in-the-mud, Chakotay. He’s so caught up in his holier-than-thou Starfleet attitude that it’s hard to remember that he was ever Maquis.”
“Hey,” Kim protested, tearing his eyes away from Tukwila’s undraped form, “there’s nothing wrong with being part of Starfleet.” Paris recalled that Harry was the only individual present at this little beach party who had never served among the Maquis. Not counting the neffaler, of course.
“No offense intended, Harry,” Tukwila said. “It’s just that I’m not sure why we have to keep pretending that we’re on some sort of formal mission when, let’s face it, none of us is ever likely to see the Alpha Quadrant again.” She stretched out on the gleaming black sand, a bronzed arm draped over her face to shield her eyes from the sun. She snapped her fingers and the neffaler fetched her a slice of juicy purple fruit from the basket. “Frankly, I think we should thank our lucky stars that we stumbled onto a paradise like Ryolanov while we’re still young enough to enjoy it.”
Paris sympathized with Tukwila’s sour feelings toward Chakotay; he’d had more than one run-in with Voyager’s strict first officer himself. Even still, he found something disturbing about the direction Tukwila’s thoughts seemed to be heading. “You’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” he asked.
“Staying here?” she answered boldly. “Of course that’s what I’m saying.” Taking a bite from the fruit, she raised herself up onto her elbows so that she could look both Kim and Paris in the eyes. “Think about it, guys: why should we risk our lives to get back to the Federation, growing old in the process, when we have everything we’ll ever want right here?”
“But we have to go home,” Kim objected, a horrified expression on his face.
“Why?” she challenged him. A thin stream of violet juice ran down her chin, dripping onto her chest. “Maybe some of you Starfleet types have ties and careers waiting for you, but all we Maquis have to look forward to are court martials or criminal prosecution. Sorry, but I’m not thrilled by the idea of spending seventy-five years in space just to get arrested at the end of the voyage. That’s assuming, of course, that we don’t get blown to pieces by the Kazon in the meantime, or reduced to spare parts by the Vidiians.”
The neffaler lingered near Tukwila, wringing its hands apprehensively. She reached out and stroked the tousled red bristles atop the primate’s head. “Cute little guy, isn’t he? Kind of nervous, though. I guess he’s not used to humans yet.” She glanced at the basket. “Either of you want a snack?”
“Sure,” Kim said. Paris nodded as well, then watched as their furry little servitor passed out pieces of the fruit to all three humans. Paris took a deep bite out of the fruit, tearing through its purple skin to the succulent pulp inside. It was delicious, tart, and sweet at the same time. Kind of like a cross between blueberry and watermelon, he decided. I could get used to this. It was definitely better than Neelix’s usual brand of gourmet cooking.
“Great, isn’t it?” Tukwila said, her broad smile stained a deep purple. “The Ryol call it sotul. Another good reason for sticking around, at least as far as I’m concerned.”
“What about the cause?” Paris asked. “The noble campaign against the Cardassians? I thought that’s what the Maquis were all about?” He didn’t have any particularly strong feelings on the subject himself—unlike Chakotay and the others, he had joined the Maquis largely for lack of anything better to do—but he wanted to know how and why Susan had managed to put the Maquis agenda behind her.
Sorrow transformed Tukwila’s expression. He heard pain and regret in her voice. “I haven’t forgotten the cause. I’d give everything I have, even all this,” she said, her gaze sweeping over the sunlit beach, the gentle waves, and the cloudless sky, “for a chance to make a difference again. But I have to be honest with myself about the hard facts of our situation. By the time Voyager gets back to the Alpha Quadrant, the conflict in the Demilitarized Zone will have been resolved, one way or another. Like it or not, I’m out of that fight for good. All I can do now is get on with my life.”
“And that means staying on Ryolanov?” Kim asked. The distress in his voice frightened the neffaler, who scurried away to the shelter of the picnic basket. Kim seemed surprisingly upset by the notion, almost as though he was protesting a bit too much. Could it be, Paris wondered, that even Harry, forever homesick for his family and fiancée back on Earth, found Ryolanov more tempting than he was ready to admit? Now that was a scary idea.
“Maybe,” she replied. “And I’m not the only person who’s feeling that way.” She gave Kim a searching look. “Seventy-five years is a long time, Harry. Are you sure you want to spend it on a Federation starship?”
“Yes!” Harry insisted. “I mean, no, of course not. But maybe we’ll find a wormhole or something. The other Caretaker could send us home tomorrow, if only we can find her again, or so could another highly advanced entity—like another Q, for instance. There are shortcuts out there. There have to be. But we’re not going to find them staying here.”
“I don’t see you in any hurry to leave,” Tukwila teased him. She grabbed the waistband of his swimming trunks and snapped it playfully against his suntanned skin.
“There’s a difference between shore leave and desertion,” Kim said, scooting across the sand until he was out of reach of Tukwila’s fingers. “We don’t have to find the shortcut right away.”
“And we might never find it,” she declared, tossing him another piece of sotul. “There’s a difference between wishful thinking and a genuine plan, too. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like gambling th
e rest of my life on the long-shot possibility that we just might happen to chance upon a quicker way home. It’s been three years already, Harry. How long are you willing to wait for your miracle?”
Kim looked like he was running low on arguments. “I don’t know,” he said weakly. “Long enough, I guess.” His eyes sought out Paris, looking to his friend for support and reinforcement. Sorry, Paris thought. She’s got me stumped, too.
He honestly wasn’t sure whose side to take in this debate. A few years ago, he reflected, there wouldn’t have been any question; he would have gladly gone AWOL on a pleasure planet like Ryolanov, hiding from his past failures and his father’s crushing expectations amid a lifestyle of unabashed hedonism. But that was before Captain Janeway gave him a second chance to make something more of his life. Redemption wasn’t an easy business, he had learned, but was he ready to throw his second chance away, even for all that paradise had to offer?
“I wouldn’t make any hasty decisions,” he advised Tukwila, amazed at his own words even as they escaped his mouth. Look who’s talking, he thought. The original seat-of-his-pants flyer. “Ryolanov is a great place to visit, no one is denying that, but you have to take everything into consideration.”
“Such as?” she asked, rolling onto her side to face him. Tiny dunes of black pellets shifted beneath her weight.
“Well, there’s always . . . that is, we can’t forget . . . something or another . . . I’m sure the captain would say . . .” He found himself momentarily incapable of making the case for Voyager versus Ryolanov. Racking his brain for a pithy and irrefutable argument for leaving the planet, he was caught off guard by the shadow that suddenly fell across him, cutting him off from the warmth of the sun. He looked up and saw looming over him the single most compelling reason to put Ryolanov far behind him.