She owed him nothing.
The high-pitched screech of the transporter built to a crescendo as a man whose face she barely remembered materialized before her. She tried to keep her countenance neutral as their eyes met, but couldn’t help a brittle smile as the memories of their brief shared past returned with stunning clarity.
She thought she had left regret behind long ago. The disquieting heat rising suddenly in her chest suggested that her feelings were more powerful than she dared admit.
“Denzit,” he greeted her.
“Welcome to Sormana, Captain Chakotay,” she said, willing her voice to calmness.
He stepped down from the transporter pad hesitantly. She waited for him to move closer, but he held his ground.
“I accepted a long time ago that we would never meet again,” she said. “But I must admit, part of me always hoped we would.”
“You and I have met before?” he asked.
“The last time I saw you, you were a commander, Voyager’s first officer.”
“I served in that capacity for seven years. I’m afraid that doesn’t narrow it down enough . . .”
“And I had just become Voyager’s captain,” the denzit added.
Chakotay’s eyes narrowed as he seemed to struggle to arrange the pieces of this puzzle in his mind. Quite suddenly, she saw comprehension mingled with disbelief.
“The shattered mirror. The shattered ship. But that’s not possible,” he said.
“It seems we have some catching up to do.”
“We do,” he agreed. “But . . .”
“Your four officers are fine,” she assured him, wondering how it had taken him this long to inquire. Had their positions been reversed, that would have been her first question. “They were initially detained in our secured cells but after confirming Mister Paris’s identity to my satisfaction, I had them taken to more appropriate and comfortable quarters. Your chief medical officer is more skilled than I would have believed possible of a hologram. Their Rilnar physiology fooled everyone but me, and he couldn’t have had much information at his disposal when he performed their cosmetic alteration.”
“Why do you assume that?” Chakotay asked.
“Had any Starfleet vessel made contact with the Rilnar prior to a few days ago, I would have been advised immediately. The Rilnar Colonial Force doesn’t have as many general orders as Starfleet, but I added that one to their books the moment I took command on Sormana.”
Chakotay tore his eyes away from her face to glance at the transporter officer.
“I will reunite you with your people shortly,” the denzit said, “unless you’d prefer to see them now.”
“If you say they are safe, I have no reason to doubt you.”
“Really?”
“You’re Kathryn Janeway, aren’t you?”
“Denzit Janeway.”
“Kathryn Janeway wouldn’t lie to me about something that important. She would know how deeply a betrayal like that would be felt and how badly it would damage our relationship. You brought me here because you want me to understand what you’re doing here. You had the capability to send my away team back using this transporter. If all you wanted was to return them, you’d have done it. You kept them here so I would come. Here I am.”
He had said once that they had become the closest of friends. She’d glimpsed some of the crucible in which that relationship had been forged without ever experiencing it in depth, but she had never doubted his sincerity and every word he spoke now confirmed it.
“We’ll talk in my office,” she said.
“Lead the way.”
• • •
Chakotay’s head was spinning as Denzit Janeway led him through a series of well-lit but nondescript stone hallways toward her office. He remembered well the incident he believed she referred to. He was the only individual in existence in this timeline who could have remembered it.
When Voyager had encountered what he believed was a temporal anomaly and been broken into thirty-seven different time periods, the one Kathryn Janeway had occupied was set before Voyager had entered the Badlands and been pulled by the Caretaker to the Delta Quadrant. After the Doctor had injected Chakotay with a chroniton serum that had allowed him to safely travel between time periods, he had found her on the bridge and had been forced to take her prisoner in order to inject her with the same serum and earn her trust. Together they had journeyed through Voyager’s past and potential future trying to resolve the crisis. When they had parted, Chakotay had believed that neither she nor any of the other alternate versions of the friends and enemies he had encountered that day would remember the incident. For them, it would never have happened.
How she had survived with her memories intact was one of many mysteries requiring an answer in order for him to accept her claim.
They passed several closed metal doors. Those with windows revealed other uniformed officers at work over desks and conference tables. Every intersection was guarded by a single armed security guard.
The installation hummed with palpable energy. The light fixtures emitted a faint buzzing chorus and every officer they passed offered crisp salutes to the denzit before continuing on with long, purposeful strides. The air was recycled and a distinct smell of burned coolant was everywhere.
The office she ushered him into was twice the size of any of the others he’d glimpsed, but still smaller than his ready room aboard Voyager. A single metal frame chair rested in a corner and the denzit placed it before her desk and gestured for him to sit.
“I can offer you water or coffee,” she said as she moved to take the seat behind the desk, a larger metal chair that looked even less comfortable than the one she’d given him.
“No, thank you,” he replied, smiling, then asked, “Did the Rilnar always have coffee or was that something you brought them?”
She almost laughed. The brief smile softened her face somewhat but was closer to a grimace than a genuine expression of delight. There were dark memories that still haunted his Kathryn’s eyes from time to time. This Kathryn Janeway’s eyes were storm filled. He wondered how long it had been since they had been clear.
“The Rilnar are civilized people, but the weak water they called saffa was worse than nothing. A friend found me a suitable replacement off-world and it has since become a profitable commodity on the black market. It is the only luxury I permit myself.”
After a short silence she continued. “I assume from your presence here, along with Mister Paris’s, that you successfully restored the temporal field that shattered Voyager into all those disparate time periods.”
“I did. The ship was returned, as we expected, to my time frame and no one on board but myself was left with any memory of the events we experienced.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I questioned Mister Paris delicately about it. His obliviousness seemed real.”
“But something went wrong, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“You believed Voyager encountered a temporal anomaly that day,” she went on.
“We both saw the rupture and the chroniton readings.”
“But you never determined the cause?”
“There was nothing left to investigate after we restored the timeline.”
“Not for you, perhaps. What I know now, and you apparently never suspected, was that the rupture was caused by the detonation of a chroniton torpedo.”
“Someone fired a chroniton torpedo at Voyager and we never detected the ship or the weapon?” Chakotay asked dubiously.
“The ship was Zahl. The torpedo was designed to disrupt the time continuum, to force Voyager back to an earlier time frame, prior to the actions you took that caused the Zahl to target you. To target me, actually.”
Chakotay shook his head in confusion and disbelief. “We never encountered the Zahl on our journey home,” he corrected her. “We passed through an area of disputed space that contained their territory, along with that of several other local species, but no contact was made.”
The denzit leaned forward, resting her chin in her left hand, and searched his face for deception. “Captain,” she finally said, “I realize that finding me here has created questions in your mind as to my identity and my loyalty. But you must not lie to me. You have no cause to do so. I am not now, nor will I ever be your enemy. If the Zahl contacts were classified, just say so.”
“There were no contacts,” Chakotay insisted. “I know you aren’t my enemy. You are clearly the victim of some terrible misunderstanding and I am prepared to do anything and everything in my power to make this situation right.”
“Misunderstanding?” she asked in a tone suggesting he’d fallen woefully short of the mark. “The Zahl fired on Voyager in an attempt to revise history. When their torpedo failed to do that, they chose the next best option. They captured me. They succeeded in transporting me off the bridge just before you activated your lightning rod and restored the timeline. They imprisoned me. They tortured me. They presented me with evidence of your Captain Janeway’s actions over almost an entire year that clearly indicate Voyager was involved in a lengthy military campaign that radically altered the balance of powers in this sector. They blamed me for the loss of a significant amount of what they considered to be their territory. It took them the better part of two years of repeated interrogations to accept the fact that I was not the Kathryn Janeway who had wronged them. At least not yet . . .”
Chakotay’s head was swimming. He did not doubt her and he was completely unprepared for the riot of emotions her words provoked in him. Intellectually, he understood that this woman was not the same one he’d spent seven years standing beside during their first journey through the Delta Quadrant; the one he had loved, grieved, and recovered; and the one to whom he had since entrusted his heart and his soul.
But that did not change the denzit’s unique claim on him.
It had been a strange and intriguing experience to meet Kathryn before she’d become his captain, his confidant, and dearest friend. Her skepticism had been alarming, as had her willingness to bend the Temporal Prime Directive to learn more about the choices she would eventually make and how they would affect her crew. Their shared experience of that day had helped him see how good the journey had been for her, despite the tragedy of its origin and the painful losses they suffered along the way. The Kathryn he had spent that day with had been tempted to restore the timeline to her period, to avoid the mission altogether. There had been a hardness in her then, something she had gradually shed over the years they worked together to survive and explore the Delta Quadrant on their way home. She’d never lost the capacity to call on her inner strength, to stand and fight when it was warranted. But she had committed herself to finding what joy there was to be had along the way and had allowed herself to form deep and powerful personal relationships with those she led.
This Kathryn Janeway had never had those experiences. Her reality had been quite different. She had moved directly from that strange day into captivity and torment. Somehow she had ended up here, fighting the people who had attacked Voyager and taken her prisoner. Chakotay had always assumed that like everyone else on board, she had been restored to her proper timeline with no memory of those events. It enraged him now to think of what she had suffered, what might have been averted had he thought to question the source of that temporal anomaly.
“You missed it,” Kathryn’s voice said again in his mind.
But equally frustrating was this story she told of a year of combat he could never have forgotten had it occurred. This made no sense.
“Kathryn,” he began.
“Denzit,” she corrected him sharply.
“No,” he shot back. “Kathryn, I swear to you, my Voyager never encountered the Zahl. The only protracted conflict we knew during the seven years it took us to return to Earth was with the Borg. Whatever evidence the Zahl showed you must have been fabricated.”
The denzit sat back in her chair, dropping her arms to her sides. She seemed deflated by his insistence. She had clearly brought him here looking for as many answers as he’d hoped to find and was every bit as puzzled by his words as he was by hers.
“If the Zahl used a chroniton torpedo, that suggests they have some advanced facility with temporal mechanics. Is it possible they got their facts wrong and even they didn’t realize it?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I heard her voice, more times than I care to remember. My voice. I don’t see how. . .”
“You’ve been fighting the Zahl for how many years now? You must know their capabilities.”
“I’ve been coordinating the war effort of the Rilnar natives on Sormana,” she corrected him. “The Zahl Regnancy wants as little to do with this planet as the Rilnar Colonial Command. But all Rilnar, here and beyond, have long feared that the Zahl had access to temporal technology. Tantalizing rumors and fragments of half-remembered myths were all they had to go on. They’ve never been able to confirm it. My capture was as close as they’ve come to concrete evidence of the Zahl’s dabbling.
“I can’t give you detailed information on the technological capabilities of the Regnancy or the Colonials. Before I volunteered to serve on Sormana, I was either a prisoner or an honored guest. My sense is that both sides have advanced tactical systems, likely on par with Starfleet’s. Both possess transporter technology. But as you must know by now, the colonists on both sides and their leaders have moved on. Colonial Command has refused to aid the natives of this planet in their quest to rid themselves of the scourge that is the Zahl. I could tell you everything about the Rilnar and Zahl capabilities here, but it bears little resemblance to those of either side’s spacefaring fleets. I’m afraid we’re fighting a conventional ground-based campaign.”
“Go back,” Chakotay requested. “How did you escape the Zahl?”
“I was rescued by the Rilnar. Their intelligence operatives had somehow learned of my capture and were investigating any evidence of Zahl temporal research. They freed me during a raid on the Zahl ship where I was being held. When I told them my story, they were intrigued. They knew nothing of me, or Voyager, but they were able to verify that I was not some Zahl counteragent. One of their lower ranking but very experienced officers made me his personal project. We spent more than a year traveling to nearby sectors, searching for any evidence of Voyager’s fate. We learned little. There were rumors of an alien vessel from a distant quadrant, enough to keep us going long after we should have abandoned the search. But they came to nothing. When we reached the outskirts of Borg space we were forced to turn back.”
“We’re only a few light-years from the heart of Zahl territory,” Chakotay said. “They launched that chroniton torpedo at us tens of thousands of light-years from here. Are their propulsion capabilities that advanced?”
“To this day I cannot tell you how the Zahl found Voyager when and where they did. I only know that when I was brought to their vessel to be imprisoned we were in Zahl space. I have not seen evidence of technology that would allow them to cover that distance, but obviously they must have it.”
Chakotay shook his head. This didn’t add up. “What happened after you gave up your search?”
Janeway sighed wistfully. “By then, a great deal had changed. The Rilnar officer I spoke of, Dayne,” she said, her voice suddenly thick, “became more than my ally and friend.” Her jaw tensed as she continued, “Those lines you once said you and I never crossed—Dayne and I did. He is a remarkable man. He reminds me of you, in some ways. He was born on Sormana but left when he was young to study in the colonies, hoping to use what he learned to aid those he left behind. He convinced me that we could do more good here than by risking assimilation. The Rilnar Colonial Command would have put me to work, but here, I could actually make a difference.
“On stardate 56863, I sent a transmission to Starfleet using the Rilnar’s longest range arrays, advising them of my resignation. I then accepted Rilnar citizenship, and a commission with the Sormana Liberation Force. I
came here, where I served for four months under the previous denzit, Kal Uthar. When he lost his life in battle, I was promoted and have led our forces here for almost three years now.”
“But your quarrel is with the Zahl Rengnancy. They were the ones who captured and tortured you. You can’t learn anything about their true motivations from here, can you?”
“The Zahl are all the same,” she replied. “When we liberate Sormana, Zahl everywhere will know that I was the one who beat them.”
“I see,” Chakotay said. It made a certain amount of sense. Part of him couldn’t imagine any version of Kathryn Janeway abandoning her quest to return home, but given the extenuating circumstances, the entrance into her life of this Dayne, anything was possible. He couldn’t blame her for choosing a little personal happiness after so many years of pain and frustration. He admired the courage it must have taken her to risk it. But to lose herself, her identity as a Starfleet officer, was still a leap he had a hard time reconciling. It would have been one thing had she simply built a life with Dayne, settled on some peaceful planet, and committed herself to living the rest of her life there. Instead, she had taken up arms, used her training and considerable abilities to help her adopted species perpetuate an ancient grudge, and turned her back on any future she might have had with her own people.
There were still so many questions, but only one would absolutely confirm the truth of her words.
“I know this is going to sound like an odd question,” Chakotay continued. “But on or around Stardate 57445, did you experience anything unusual?”
He expected to see her search her memory. Instead, she started visibly, as if she had been slapped. Her eyes flashed as the demons there she barely held at bay struggled for release. She seemed briefly on the verge of tears, but some defense solidified around her, transforming her from cold to stone.
“What significance does that stardate hold for you?” she demanded slowly.
Star Trek: Voyager: A Pocket Full of Lies Page 8