To Tell The Truth Series 05 Turning Point

by Melanie

  Neelix boggled at him. "Tom?"

  Seven nodded approvingly. "I believe the natives will be fooled, Lieutenant."

  "That is the plan," Tom agreed, straightening. "Sunfire, readings from the subdermal communicator?"

  "All normal," she said, distractedly.

  "What is it?"

  "Someone's just broken the Doctor's locks. The access codes match that of Harry Kim."

  "Origin of the signal?"

  She showed him and everyone's eyes widened.

  After a moment's silence, Tom spoke again. "Any sign of the Captain?"

  "None yet."

  Tom swore softly. "I don't like doing things piecemeal like this. The minute the crew disappears the alarm's going to be raised. They'll know someone's here, even if they can't see us. Wherever the Captain is, she's sure to be moved to some place even more secure or at least the security will be beefed up." He rubbed his long fingered hands over his face. "Okay, this is what we're going to do. Neelix, keep looking for Gherop and greys. Doctor, take over watching the grey on Voyager. Seven, confine yourself to finding

  the Captain. Sunfire, crack the greys' systems. I'm going to need a diversion to get out of the tunnel and into the hallway. Once on level six, I'll set the enhancers then go after Harry. When I have him, begin beaming the crew up to Voyager. Hopefully, we'll have found the Captain as well by that point and we can grab her at the same time. Any questions?"

  No one said anything.

  "Sunfire, if you please?"

  A pack materialized at his feet. A quick inventory to double-check the contents was undertaken. A wrist lamp as back up for his contact lenses, a spare combadge in case his subdermal one went awry, his phaser pistol, a medkit, and the enhancers lay inside. Unlike the standard issue pattern enhancers Starfleet used, the AlphaOmegan ones were small disks slightly smaller and thinner than Tom's palm. They required no stands to support them like their Starfleet cousins did. These merely were attached to a wall or discretely dropped on the floor and they did their job. Satisfied he was well provisioned, he checked for his stiletto in its sheath in his boot and small tricorder he had attached to the strap on his wrist like a twentieth century watch. Everything was where it should be.

  "Ready."

  "You're sure you don't want to wear your phaser?" Neelix asked worriedly.

  "Too noticeable. I'll be able to get at it if I need it. Hopefully, I won't need it at all anyway."

  "Be careful."

  Tom nodded then disappeared in a transporter beam.

  -------

  As dusk was falling, they had picked up their full berry baskets and finally noticed one of the smaller children in their group was missing. Dtu, who as the oldest of the thirteen children who had been sent out from their village that dawn to collect Hwa-Hwa berries was the de facto leader of the group. She checked everyone's lanterns were working then immediately ordered them to split up to search the rapidly darkening area. She herself found Lre only a short time later, coming towards her.

  "Where have you been?" Dtu demanded of the little girl. "You were supposed to be helping us."

  "I found another patch of berries and-"

  "These are Jpa berries," she said dumping out the basket of the poisonous, Hwa-Hwa look-a-likes. "You didn't eat any, did you?"

  "No, but I saw something weird," she impatiently whispered as others of the search party came upon them.

  "What did you see?"

  "I saw a male appear out of nowhere and go that way." She pointed towards the mountain and the stronghold all Rachar in the area knew was a prison and tactical installation for the Gherop.

  "A traitor?" Jmi, one of the older children, offered.

  "Perhaps," Dtu mused. "Did you recognize him? Was he P'Chi?"

  The little girl shook her head. "No, he looked like us, not them."

  Looking up as the last of the children ran towards them, Dtu began firing off orders. "Jmi, Lta, and Pmka stay with me. The rest of you go back to the village. Go to my mother. She'll be at home and tell her what Lre saw and that we're going to check this out."

  "We are?" Jmi gasped.

  "Yes."

  Though their Gherop masters did not know it, the tiny village the children came from was the main Verta base of operations. Not every one of the villagers knew this, but Dtu did. Her father, mother, and oldest brother were active in the Verta. Her father himself was rather high up in the ranks. And Dtu wanted to be too some day. She dreamed of helping them, maybe even being the one responsible for forcing their enslavers from their world once and for all. It was this thought that made her want to go after the presumed

  traitor.

  After much objection, the others went and the four snuck after their quarry.

  -------

  There was little mystery as to why the entrance to the tunnel was free of security measures -- it was practically plugged. A landslide had obscured all but the narrow opening Tom wiggled through. As he carefully made his way along a passage no one other than wildlife had traversed in some time, it brought back memories from long ago. For once they were not horrific ones.

  Everywhere it was pitch black except above. There were minute pinpricks in the black velvet curtain. Only the thinnest of slivers of Sol's moon marred the perfection of the Heavens. Oh, how he wanted to be up there, amongst those stars. And one day soon he would be. *If* he did well enough on this exercise to impress the Academy brass. The Admiral -- through his aide as usual -- had said in his last transmission that the better Tom did during this BRAT camp exercise, the greater his chances for early admission to the Academy. And Tom wanted to get into the Academy almost as much as the Admiral wanted him there. Naturally, Owen and his son did not have the same reasons for that desire. Owen envisioned Tom's entrance into the Academy as the first step in following in the footsteps of other Paris’s and going on to greatness. Tom merely wanted any path that would lead to his sitting at the helm of a starship.

  He, with his contraband night vision contacts, did a scan of the area before moving a millimeter. No surprises waiting for him out there. Nothing but rocks, dirt, and a few nocturnal animals. Exactly as he had expected. He reached into his jacket pocket for the tricorder he had been issued along with the rest of his equipment. Of course, it was not operating within the same parameters as it had been when given to him. He tapped out a series of commands then immediately he slunk off into the darkness, knowing the

  BRAT camp's monitoring devices were displaying exactly what he wanted them to see -- him sound asleep and unmoving.

  Ingenuity was what was called for were he to impress the jaded officials who had seen everything during the years the camp had operated and he was going to give it to them. After all, the Admiral *had* said -- through his aide -- that showing some initiative would get the attention of the Brass. This would get their attention like nothing else.

  Finding the squad of Starfleet Ranger cadets on a training exercise was a stroke of luck. Instantly, he scrapped his original plan and improvised. He slipped his tricorder back into his pack, took out his wrist lamp, switched it on, then bold as brass walked right into the middle of their encampment and sat down next to the cadet wearing the insignia of the squad leader.

  "Hi ya," he greeted, looking every millimeter the innocent fifteen year old he was not. "What you doing?"

  The jaws of every single cadet dropped.

  "Who...? Where...?" the leader stammered.

  He stuck out his hand to her. "Tom Paris. How you doing?"

  She looked at his hand like she never had seen one before. Tentatively, she shook it. "Jacqui Marquez. What are you doing out here in the middle of the Outback?"

  Removing his pack, he set it at his feet and gestured to it saying nothing.

  "You're hiking, by yourself, in the middle of the Outback, at night?"

  He shrugged nonchalantly.

  "So where are you headed."

  "Yuendumu."

  "That's quite a ways off."

  Anot
her shrug. "About a day's hike. What about all of you? What are you doing out here? It's a funny place for a camp out."

  "Training exercise."

  Tom looked at their uniforms as though not having noticed them before. "Wow, really? Are you Starfleet?"

  She nodded. "Rangers."

  "Oh, wow. That's so cool."

  Her brow and those of the others in her squad wrinkled. "Cool?"

  "Twentieth Century slang. It means a combination of great and interesting and fun."

  "Oh."

  "Can I stay here tonight? I've never met real Starfleet Rangers before."

  His tone was ingratiating without being nauseating. His face showed only eagerness. Still, as he had hoped the second in command and the leader cast each other looks.

  "If you will excuse us for a moment?" Cadet Marquez said and she and the young male who was her second rose and moved off a couple of meters.

  "I don't like this," Tom's keen ears heard her second say, despite the other cadets resuming chattering amongst themselves. "What's a kid his age doing out here, all alone, in the middle of the night."

  "A runaway maybe," his leader suggested.

  "Maybe. Or maybe it's part of the exercise. You know my brothers all went through this same training years ago. I can remember them griping about the surprises they had had pulled on them. The instructors deliberately changing the scenario midway through the exercise so they would have to improvise and think on their feet. They'd walk into an ambush. The intell they'd have received during their mission briefing would be all wrong but they wouldn't find out until they had landed. The objective wouldn't be where it was supposed to be. All that kind of thing. What if this is one of those things?"

  "What if they're trying to see what we'd do if a civilian suddenly wandered into the equation is what you're

  saying?"

  "Yes."

  "But he's just a kid."

  "And very innocuous looking. What better to put us off our guards? If they were throwing a hydrospanner into the works, he's just the kind of person they'd send. If they sent some huge, battle-scarred Klingon to do it, we'd be on guard for sure."

  "But we're still on guard. A kid out here, in the middle of the night is very suspicious."

  "But if it weren't for my having heard my brothers talking about their training exercise horror stories, we wouldn't know he could be sent by the brass. We'd automatically take him at face value or think he was a runaway. If we thought the latter, we would break radio silence to call the authorities to return him to his family and the enemy would pinpoint us for sure. They'd swoop down on us and we'd get an 'F' grade and be out of the program faster than we could open our mouths to explain our failure. I don't know about you, Marquez, but I worked hard to get here. Every Dante male and half of the females for the last three generations has been in the Rangers and I'm not going to be the one to break tradition."

  "So it's rock and a hard place time. If he is a runaway, we can't leave him out here on his own for something to happen to him because our butts would really be in a sling then. If he's a plant, we can't let him go or he'll reveal our position to the 'hostiles,' but we also can't keep him because he could sabotage us."

  "You're the leader. What do we do?" He shot her a sarcastic grin. "Killing him clearly isn't an option."

  She gave him an exasperated sigh. "You're never going to let me forget that simulation, are you. And it *was* a solution to the problem, even if the computer said it wasn't permissible." She sighed. "We really have no choice but to keep him with us. Have him watched. Rotating shifts of two hours until morning. Keep him at the fire and all chatter kept to minimum. I want him in the dark about our strengths and attack plan."

  "What about in the morning?"

  "If he is a runaway, someone will have noticed he is missing by then. He doesn't look dirty enough to have been out here more than a few hours so he may not have been missed yet. Once he is, they'll use the planetary sensors to locate him and his family or the authorities will come for him."

  "And if he's not a runaway?"

  "Then we'll have to figure out what to do with him by then. Tell everyone to go to bed. I'll take first watch with him and see if I can get him to open up. He might talk to me."

  But Tom had kept up his charade all night. Each of the cadets obviously had been warned about the possibility of his being a plant. All did their best to keep him on safe subjects like his family, the stars, school, anything but the subject he -- in his role of fascinated Ranger-wanna-be -- was determined to discuss -- what it was like to be a Ranger cadet.

  All the while, he had his modified tricorder out, supposedly recording their answers to his questions for a school report he was going to right once the school holiday was over. In reality he had interfaced with their equipment and was hacking into their database to give them a new "target." By the time the others awoke in the morning, they suddenly no longer were on the approved Ranger exercise but were helping him to achieve his BRAT camp exercise "target."

  And he even had solved their little dilemma of who he really was and what to do with him. A well-timed "slip" about "being in no hurry because no one was expecting him in Yuendumu" confirmed for them the idea he was a runaway. Marquez, in her best motherly tone, had coaxed the gangly youth into "admitting" he had run away without leaving a note for his parents and was going to Yuendumu to see his grandmother who "understood him," unlike his parents.

  Feeling much better about the situation, they had tried to convince him to go home, but he would have none of it. He "wanted to help them." He always had wanted to be a Ranger and if he could help them, maybe his parents could see he could do this and they'd let him apply once he'd graduated school, instead of making him "go into the family business of replicator repair." Marquez -- like most females -- had fallen for his pleading look and relented. So it was with a contingent of Ranger cadets that Tom achieved his target hours before any of this fellow Campers even had emerged from the Outback.

  Of course, there had been Hell to pay from the officials and the cadets' instructors and much later Owen, but Tom had neatly justified his actions, even going so far as to convince the cadets' instructors that this should not be considered a failure on the cadets' part. He had stressed the strengths of the cadets, but had not glossed over the weaknesses either. He also had not minced words about the lack of communication between the BRAT camp officials and the Rangers. The fact he would not have been able to pull this off it they had alerted each other they were in the area was a huge point in his favor. As was the fact there was nothing in the rules of the camp actually forbidding anything he had done.

  All in all, it had been quite the humbling experience for all but the one who had been expected to be humbled. The twenty-three adults in the conference room had expected they would be the ones doing all the talking and chastising, not the fifteen year old who was showing all the presence and mastery of a situation that Paris’s always did.

  In the end, they had buried the entire incident to preserve their public images. How would it have looked if word had got out future Rangers had been tricked by a fifteen year old with some computer skills and a lot of acting ability? For the good of all, Tom had been given an "A" for the exercise and excused from the rest of the camp. The cadets had been given "B"s and returned to their studies. The Camp officials and Rangers' instructors each began redrafting their rules for exercises and redesigning their computer security systems so nothing like this could ever happen again. And no one had asked Tom for an explanation of how he had managed to do what he had. Tom himself had wondered at the time where the skills had come from, but had shoved it aside as things learned through osmosis, that he might not have been paying strict attention in all of his classes, but his brain had taken in the information anyway.

  Tom jerked back to the present and very nearly stumbled. It had not been osmosis, he now realized. His "Tom Paris" life and "AlphaOmegan 41783" life overlapping when Raven had arranged for him to see his fat
her's file and the notation about his being tortured by the Cardassians had not been the first time. Now he could remember other things he had been taught by Alpha Two and the other Alphas and the technicians, things he had used in his "civilian" life. Since he had Awoken all those months ago, he had

  known he was what the Alphas had made him. However, that had not stopped him from hoping there was at least a chance that some of his past achievements and disasters were of his own doing, not dictated by the Training or deliberately arranged by the Protectors. Now he knew that was not true. There really was absolutely nothing left of the Tom Paris who had been meant to be before the Protectors came onto the scene.

  Shaking his head, he forced back the tears that threatened and continued on, concentrating totally on his objective until he reached level 5, dusty and with hands scraped. After wiping his face clean and fluffing his hair and clothes to shake out the dust, he moved forwards to crouch near the grate covering the outlet to the corridor. Momentarily, he paused remembering other times he had done this yet with a far different outcome in mind. No one was going to die this time. Not if he could help it and certainly not by his hand.

  All the same, he triple-checked his stiletto and phaser pistol just in case.

  Suddenly, the lights in the hallway went out without warning. 'They managed to crack their systems,' Tom smiled as he removed the grate cover and joined the chaos in the hall mere seconds before the pale blue emergency lights came on.

  -------

  In the lift, on their way back to the upper levels, D'Ere was silent as E'Arte grumbling to him about Janeway's stubborn refusal to talk. Then the lights went out and the lift shuddered to a halt, brakes screeching as they clamped on to keep them from falling. They were only stuck there for a brief moment until the emergency power faintly illuminated the car and resumed their ascension, still it was a very unhappy E'Arte who stormed into the room where I'Nu was speaking with D'Ere's clerk.

  "What just happened?" E'Arte demanded.

  "A temporary power failure," I'Nu explained. "They have them from time to time. Maintenance has been dispatched to handle it."