Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  “Why didn’t you see him after you were five?”

  She sighed. He was certainly in an inquisitive mood today. Maybe she could dispatch all his questions at once. “He left us.”

  She felt his blue eyes on her and resisted the impulse to look back at him. “Why?” he asked.

  There was that funny little constriction of her heart, the one that seemed to clench her every time that particular question arose. “I don’t know,” she replied honestly. She could hear the stream ahead, through the trees, and was glad this conversation would soon have a natural break.

  They had reached the stream, a cold, lush current nearly ten meters across which ran swiftly on its pell-mell course toward a valley below. At this point in its descent, it leveled briefly, forming a large pool which, though still flowing, was less turbulent than its extremities. B’Elanna waded right into it, gasping slightly at the shock of the icy chill on her sun-warmed body, hoping the plunge would divert Tom from this relentless pursuit of her past.

  He followed her, half-diving into the cold pool, surfacing quickly and spitting water like a blowing whale. She laughed, and the tenseness of the previous moments was dissipated. He playfully shoved a spray of water toward her and, enjoying the childlike abandon, she splashed him back. They continued in that way, laughing and choking, forgetting the stifling heat of the clearing as they frolicked like bear cubs.

  Then she submerged. She was a strong swimmer, and knew she could catch him unawares, circling him and coming up behind him. She reached for his legs and upended him, toppling him into the water in a heap. She surfaced to enjoy the spectacle, careful to stay out of his reach. He came sputtering to the surface and immediately looked around for her. She smiled and ducked under once more. She would lead him on a chase he couldn’t win.

  The water was colder beneath the surface and the currents stronger, but neither was problematic. B’Elanna knew where she was headed: a series of boulders that formed a mazelike arrangement in the center, deepest part of the stream. She pulled strongly toward them, unable to see in the rushing water, but guided by memory and instinct, and soon made contact with one of the stones. She clasped it firmly and dragged herself past it and into the field of boulders.

  The water was quiet within this maze, the huge stones deflecting the current. B’Elanna felt an immediate sensation of tranquillity as she moved lazily among the forest of stones. Given her lung capacity, there was no doubt in her mind that she could outlast Tom Paris.

  Fluttering like a fish among the huge boulders, she smiled to think of Tom’s consternation when she failed to reappear. It was not a nice trick, certainly, but he was pushy and arrogant and deserved to be shaken up a little. He’d find out she was not someone to be taken lightly.

  She found a handhold on one of the stones and was surprised that it wobbled slightly. She had thought these stones were firmly embedded in the channel. But after it shifted slightly, it settled once more into its footing. B’Elanna continued to wind her way through the rocky corridors.

  The collapse of the boulders happened so gently she was almost unaware of it at first. There was a sense of motion in the water—a lazy roiling that conveyed no alarm—and then movement from above made her lift her head, even though she could see nothing.

  Only vague surprise came over her as she felt the pile of stones lower gently on her, like a feather-cloud of soft blankets. She was pushed softly to the silt bed of the stream and covered by a network of smooth boulders. There was nothing violent about the act, nothing that seemed brutal or dangerous. It was like a delicate caress, casual and soothing.

  Except that she couldn’t move.

  She didn’t panic. There were minutes to go before she would need to breathe again. There would be a way out from under this stony covering and she would rise to the surface to delight in Tom’s astonishment.

  She maneuvered her body as best she could to find a point of leverage. The stones were cradling her so softly it seemed impossible they could resist her efforts to push them off. But try as she might, with both legs and arms, she couldn’t budge them.

  Still, she felt no fear. There was an unreality to the situation that kept her in a state of disbelief. She expected at any moment to feel the stones yield to her and float off, as they might in a dream.

  She didn’t know how much time had passed before she realized they might not. She had tried everything to shift her granite shroud, but the boulders hadn’t moved so much as a millimeter. Soon, she would have to breathe. If not, she would die.

  But strangely, this thought didn’t energize her. In fact, her mind began to wander, and she stopped straining at her rocky tomb. Images of childhood swirled in her mind, but unlike most of her recollections of her youth, these produced no anxieties. Why had she always been so angry? It seemed so unnecessary now. Her father had gone, and she lacked friends . . . but her mother was always there. Always. Her mother had taught her to be strong . . . stronger than any of the other children . . . smarter . . . why had she allowed those human children to make her feel unworthy? Why did she drive them away?

  Drive them away?

  The thought flickered in her mind for a moment like the wings of a desperate insect trapped in a cobweb. She had created her own isolation. Here, in this tranquil pool, soon to be her grave, the thought had the clarity of beautiful crystal. She had yielded to her Klingon temperament, and therein lay her undoing.

  She could have behaved in a more human way. Her life would have been free of anguish, she would have had friends, she would have been loved. Why did insight come too late?

  Vague memories of her father drifted through her mind . . . he was on the floor on hands and knees, she sitting astride him shrieking with a toddler’s delight . . . he was pulling covers over her, kissing her cheek and saying good night . . . his cheek scratchy on hers . . . he was calling to her to jump . . . jump from the dock into the lake . . . he would catch her . . . he would keep her safe . . . he would protect her and love her . . .

  Why had he gone away? Why wasn’t she ever told?

  Then she realized: She could have known. If she had answered his messages at the Academy, she would have that knowledge. He had offered to share it, wanted to explain, wanted to see her and perhaps even love her again.

  But she hadn’t had the courage to contact him.

  And so she would die here on this forsaken planetoid never knowing the great mystery of her life, never having the opportunity to force her Klingon fierceness into submission and to become as human as she possibly could. And it would have been so easy . . .

  She felt sleepy. Was this what it was like to die? This drowsy peacefulness? Why was it so feared, then, if it was this easy? Of course her mother had always taught her that the best death, the honorable death, was in battle. And that might not be as gentle as this. She’d heard tales all her life of glorious Klingon battles, and the heroes who died in horrible, if honorable, circumstances. Better this placid death, this serene acceptance of the inevitable. She could do without honor . . .

  A pressure, a weight, was lifted from her and she imagined this was the moment of death. A release of earthly bonds, a lightening, and then the journey—where? Was there a destination? Or would oblivion follow, a nothingness? That might be preferable to the unknown . . .

  Then she realized that the lifting of pressure was her release from the network of boulders. A hand was pulling at her arm—it hurt!—tugging and tugging until she thought her arm would be pulled from its socket, and then suddenly she was ascending through the waters of the stream, choking, gasping, taking water into her lungs, thrashing wildly but held in an inexorable grip until she broke the surface.

  Tom was pulling her toward shore. She was coughing wildly, trying to expel the water she had sucked into her lungs. And she was freezing cold. This was altogether more unpleasant than the watery tomb had been.

  Tom flung her onto shore and crawled after her. She looked up at him between coughing bouts and saw that his face
was pale, his sandy hair hanging in sodden tendrils over his eyes. “Okay,” he was saying, “okay, you’re going to be all right.”

  The hacking bouts diminished and she struggled to a sitting position. She felt queasy and her throat burned from coughing. She tried to speak, but the effort triggered another eruption of coughs, and the sour taste of the stream water stung her mouth. Tom rubbed her back helplessly.

  Finally, she was able to talk. “Thanks,” she rasped, and felt horribly guilty at the trick she had intended to play on him.

  “I can’t believe you’re still alive,” he said, and his voice reflected his concern. “You were down there forever. Until those stones fell, I didn’t even know where to look.”

  She took several deep breaths. Gradually, her body was beginning to feel normal again. “Tom,” she croaked, “can we send a subspace message from the shuttle?”

  He shook his head. “Not through the plasma storms in the Badlands. We’ll have to wait until we rendezvous with Chakotay.”

  She got to her feet. “Then let’s get that cabin put up. I have to contact someone in Mexico.”

  He looked at her quizzically, but she had already set off through the woods. She wanted to finish their task as quickly as possible. The answers to the great questions of her life were within her grasp.

  That was almost the full extent of her interaction with Tom Paris before he disappeared. A day later they were attacked by two Cardassian vessels and, while the Liberty managed to destroy them, it was left badly damaged. Chakotay had sent Tom in a shuttle to bring help, but Tom never returned. So much, thought Torres, for loyalty.

  Chakotay had returned from Bajor with a new crew member, a dark Vulcan named Tuvok. B’Elanna welcomed the return of a Vulcan to their midst, but her mind wasn’t really on Maquis activities at the moment. She told Chakotay she had to send some subspace messages and he gave his permission, warning her only to disguise the location of the transmission origin.

  She spent some time working on a routing scheme that would conceal the whereabouts of the ship sending the messages, then created two separate transmissions: one to her father in Mexico and one to her mother on Nessik.

  It would be several days before the messages could wend their way from relay station to relay station and reach their destinations, and several days more before a reply could be expected. But five or six days wasn’t too long to wait to get the answers she sought. B’Elanna felt almost at peace. A reconciliation with her mother and a relationship with her father were tangible possibilities, well within her grasp.

  She found her longing for Chakotay had abated somewhat, and she felt almost friendly toward Seska. She sensed a balance to her life that had always eluded her. She had several conversations with the Vulcan Tuvok, and found him as calming an influence as Setonak had been. She looked forward to knowing him.

  Two days after she had sent her messages, the ship suddenly went to red alert and B’Elanna bolted from the crew’s mess to the bridge. Tuvok was there, and Chakotay. “Cardassian ship approaching,” Chakotay said, and she heard the tension in his voice. Scanning her own station, she saw that it was a Galor-class warship, the most heavily armed of all the Cardassian fleet.

  They leapt to warp, but the warship was already within range. Phaser fire began pummeling them. Tuvok released a photon torpedo, which did them some damage, but they kept coming.

  “We have to get back to the Badlands,” Chakotay said, just as a volley of fire ruptured a coolant conduit.

  But the Badlands was not to be sanctuary for them that day. Amid the plasma storms, with which they were familiar, was another lurking anomaly, their first indication of which was a brilliant flash of light.

  “What was that?” queried Chakotay.

  “Curious. We’ve just passed through some kind of coherent tetryon beam,” replied Tuvok.

  “Source?”

  “Unknown. Now there appears to be a massive displacement wave moving toward us . . .”

  They watched their monitors as a strange, foglike phenomenon swept toward them from behind. “At current speeds,” announced Tuvok, “it’s going to intercept us in less than thirty seconds.”

  They tried to outrun it, but it swept relentlessly toward them, quickly overwhelming them in a light that dazzled, then blinded them.

  And so it was that the Liberty was plucked from the Alpha and into the Delta Quadrant, where the crew was eventually thrown together with the crew of the Starship Voyager, and B’Elanna, in spite of all her efforts to avoid it, was reunited with Starfleet.

  Almost immediately she was reminded of all she didn’t like about the institution. It manifested itself in the person of Captain Kathryn Janeway, who stood for all the lofty principles that Starfleet represented, but who made a decision that severely impacted every member of both crews: she destroyed the technology that brought them to this part of space, and which could have returned them home.

  “Who is she to be making these decisions for all of us?” B’Elanna had erupted when she realized Janeway intended to destroy the Caretaker’s Array.

  “She’s the captain,” said Chakotay simply, and B’Elanna had no choice except to watch as Voyager fired tricobalt devices that demolished the Array and thereby prevented the warlike Kazon from being able to invade the gentle Ocampa people.

  And that meant that all the myriad loose ends of her life at home would be left dangling. She’d never be able to talk to her mother and father, never have her questions answered, never reconcile the conflicted feelings that lay within her. She was on a Starfleet ship surrounded by Starfleet personnel, butting right up against all the regulations and protocols and restrictions that had driven her from the Academy in the first place.

  This was going to be a long, long journey.

  CHAPTER

  7

  B’ELANNA LOOKED AROUND AT THE FACES OF HER FRIENDS, who were staring at her intently. “I hated her at first. I was furious because she’d cheated me of the life I thought I wanted.”

  She was silent for a moment, staring into the flames of their small fire. Then she looked back at the others. “But eventually I realized I had no one to blame but myself. All my problems came from inside me, not from the captain. She’d done a very noble and courageous thing. I just happened to be there, like all of you.”

  She didn’t make eye contact with Chakotay. She was a little embarrassed at having revealed her once-powerful feelings for him. And she didn’t look at Tom Paris. They’d been through so much together, but she’d never told him that she’d once been infatuated with Chakotay. She hoped he’d understand.

  Tuvok abruptly interjected, changing the subject entirely. “After assessing the situation, I believe the most successful option we have is to construct a tunnel.”

  But this brought an immediate response from Coris, who was sitting next to Harry. She’d become a fixture among their group since he’d brought her back with him from the stream, but B’Elanna hadn’t heard her say much of anything, certainly not with such firm authority. All eyes swung to her.

  She looked better than she did when Harry first found her. More rested, less like a frightened animal. Her startling eyes caught the light of the flames and seemed to be on fire themselves. “They have sensors which penetrate to a depth of ten kilometers, and below that is solid psilminite. If you try to dig, they’ll know it immediately.”

  “How do you know?” asked Harry.

  “I was nearby when the guards discovered a tunnel some others had constructed. The guards made a point of telling everyone within range how foolish it was to try to escape, because of all the sensors.”

  B’Elanna, who was more than happy to turn the discussion to subjects other than her life and its tangled emotional web, began considering other possibilities. “Too bad we don’t have a transporter,” she said, half joking. “We could just beam ourselves out.”

  Coris took her seriously. “But the sensor net is said to extend beyond the enclosure for another hundred meters.
You’d still be detected.”

  “As long as we’re wishing for transporters, let’s wish for one that would take us beyond sensor range.”

  “What do you figure we’d need to make one, Harry?” This from B’Elanna, who was now seriously considering the idea.

  “A lot more than we have, that’s for sure. A matter-energy converter, some phase transition coils . . . a power supply, control circuitry . . .”

  “Anybody seen anything like that around the camp?” queried Chakotay, and the question brought somber chuckles. Not likely.

  “But if we took apart our combadges, we’d have plenty of control circuitry,” mused B’Elanna, intrigued now by the challenge. “And who knows what there might be in this camp? We’ve only been looking for certain items. Maybe there’s a way to do this.”

  Her enthusiasm was contagious, and the mood of the group lightened. Inspired, B’Elanna considered all the ramifications of this fragile plan. “We should move our shelters,” she noted. “We’re right in the middle of the camp now. If we’re able to build a transporter, it would be primitive. We’d have a shorter distance to beam ourselves if we were closer to one of the walls.”

  Chakotay had started to agree when Coris interrupted once more. “No,” she said, “they’ll know what you’ve done. They watch for escape attempts. If you move for no reason at all they’ll be suspicious. They’ll inspect your shelters every day.”

  Her words hung heavily in the chill night air. B’Elanna didn’t doubt them, and was sure no one else did, either. But Tuvok wasn’t about to see this plan shattered.

  “Then we must concoct a compelling reason to move,” he announced calmly.

  “A fight,” said Tom Paris immediately, and B’Elanna shot him a smile. Leave it to Tom to come up with that solution. But even Tuvok saw its logic.

  “Continue, Mr. Paris,” he intoned.

  “We stage an altercation. A big one, that turns into a brawl. There’s anger, and hostility. When the fight is over, most of us move one of the shelters to another location. Close to the wall. It’ll look like bad blood between us has caused the move.”