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“Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love,
the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)
... to all the might-have-beens.
Timeless : Fugue
2390, ALPHA QUADRANT
U.S.S. CHALLENGER: STARDATE 71143.3
Name: Harry S.L. Kim
Born: 2349
Service in Starfleet: assignment to U.S.S. Voyager, 2371-2375,
assignment to U.S.S. Explorer, 2375-2379, chief of operations
Rank: Ensign, declined promotion to Lieutenant
Current status: commission resigned 2381
Current location: unknown
Charges: high treason, theft of classified Starfleet property,
conspiracy to violate the Temporal Prime Directive
Captain Geordi La Forge tapped his thumb against his lower lip as the subspace link paraded the data across the screen. Early this morning, Starfleet Command had alerted him to the possibility that two dangerous fugitives might surface somewhere near the sector his ship currently patroled. The charges were staggering, the conceivable impact of their plans more so.
Two men, acting on their own? he’d asked, incredulous. Who are they, and how could they possibly pose such a threat?
His answer was in the encrypted file that Headquarters transmitted, keyed to his command codes, strictly eyes only. Or ocular implants, as the case might be. As he scrolled from caption to caption, La Forge had to admit that the threat was no product of paranoid exaggeration. A pair of rogue ex-officers had set out to annihilate fifteen years of history.
Big guns, definitely the biggest brought to bear on him since he’d received his own command. La Forge shifted in his seat as he tried to assimilate the news. Damnit, he wanted an occupation for his hands — preferably the recalibration of Challenger’s plasma manifolds he’d planned for today — not glue his eyes and mind to an interstellar disaster in the making. He drummed his fingers against the console without hitting a recognizable rhythm.
Harry Kim had been a model student, a model officer, the file claimed, and a supremely talented engineer, showing all the promise and potential of a first-rate innovator. The very stuff of Starfleet’s dreams.
La Forge stared at his picture, then the picture of his accomplice, Chakotay. Former Starfleet Commander, former Maquis, once reformed and twice renegade now. After all the code-hacking, law-breaking and cold-blooded deception the pair had already pulled off, their ultimate goal didn’t seem so far out of range. ‘Fleet Security had reason to be worried, very good reason to flag them as most wanted terrorists anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant. Kim and Chakotay were getting ready to spell amok backwards.
Not terrorists, good men driven to extremes, La Forge amended his judgement when he’d absorbed the vital facts, an hour later. Driven insane perhaps, but who could blame them? He rubbed a weary hand over his mouth and cursed softly, extensively.
Put me in their position, and — who knows. I might do the same.
But he’d have to hunt them down nonetheless, shoot them down if necessary. The Temporal Prime Directive was an imperative on which their existence depended. Literally. Alter history, and you’d fracture temporal continuity. Fracture continuity at a crucial point, and you might make history by destabilizing the vast, precarious equilibrium that upheld the spacetime continuum. Only there might be no history, no posterity left to take note.
∞ ∞ ∞
When Harry Kim stepped down from the transporter platform and walked through the modulating doors of Starfleet Headquarters, he wore a nondescript civilian suit and carried nothing but a copy of his Release Certificate. Starfleet had been the armature and the framework of his life, long before he received his first assignment. And now Starfleet fell away from him like dry snakeskin.
They refused to continue the search for Voyager, he resigned his commission: the two events went hand in glove.
But, even without the cumbersome assistance of a counselor, Harry recognized the more intimate reason that had made this an easy choice. He’d lost all energy for attachments, the very conduits that charged Starfleet with hopes and ideals and fed him joy, confidence, excitement in return.
One hundred and fifty casualties could do that to the most optimistic soul.
Within days of resigning his commission, he set up his own company to foot the substantial bills he intended to accumulate. His services — soon enough, his ingenious programs — were in high demand. His knowledge of variegated exotic technologies and his experience with improvising solutions outside the known frames of reference allowed him to improve diagnostic routines in almost any type of ship.
It took him six months to establish his business, at which point he hired an assistant who never discovered more than the offical version of his back-story and respected Harry’s silence alongside the tight, complex schedule he’d devised for himself. The latter was dictated by his paramount priorities, staggered by degree of impossibility.
One, locate Voyager.
Two, calculate the accurate phase corrections to compensate for a point-four-two phase variance in the slipstream threshold.
Three, locate means of communicating these corrections back through time.
None of these three could be accomplished by drawing solely on the data already at his disposal. So, among the countless peripheral activities that patterned his days and nights, Harry became an expert at masking his research, both legitimate and illegal. Wherever his digital probes went, they left no traceable binary trail. He became a one-man army of ghosts scouring intelligence networks, surfing interstellar data streams, picking the locks of high-security algorithms. Impossibility became his trusted commander, his lode star, the pivot of his only pledge.
In the course of that year, a hard-won peace treaty with the Romulan Empire claimed all the headlines, and Harry stopped dreaming. The bioneural scans that he submitted himself to periodically suggested that he entered REM sleep and did, in fact, dream, but none of it took hold in his memory anymore. Perhaps he’d run out of storage space. It was a relief he didn’t deserve but had no way of refusing either.
His time count was already out of sync with the rest of the universe. Six years of living a false future, trapped in a wrong timeline whose existence he’d caused by a single calculation error. By ignoring the truth when it punched him in the gut.
After the holiday season, he went on a business trip to Bajor, with a scheduled stopover on Deep Space Nine, still one of the busiest hubs in the Alpha Quadrant. Time to get back in touch with an old acquaintance. The only one he still counted on.
2382, ALPHA QUADRANT: DEEP SPACE NINE
The Celestial Café, on the second level of the Promenade, was a classy little restaurant designed to keep out the crowds. At a time of night that fell somewhere between late dinners and early breakfasts, only a few patrons who didn’t care to be seen drinking in public were left inside the establishment. They’d diligently picked isolated tables to nurse their beverage of choice. Equally isolate beams illuminated the tabletops so that each gleamed like a lily pad afloat on a dark pond. Harry strolled in without a glance over his shoulder, without a change in his breathing pattern. This place didn’t call up any memories. He’d already gone through a complex detour to avoid Quark’s Bar.
At a table tucked into a corner, half screened by a potted Bajoran fossil tree, sat a broad-shouldered man, ostensibly engrossed in the output of a palm-sized news dispenser. With a nod for the waitress, Harry walked across and seated himself in the free chair. A chance meeting, to any external observer.
“Been a long time, Chakotay.”
“Harry.” Chakotay’s tone was calm to the point of neutral, but his eyes flashed with barely subdued ambivalence. Disquiet, recognition, perhaps a stir of unwarranted relief, before his glance warmed almost beyond the point that Harry could bear. Sympathy always had that effect on him. He knew best what stared back at him from the mirror each morning.
“You’re looking a little worse for the wear yourself,” he made light of it.
Chakotay maintained the general impression of robust health and competence, but the hair at his temples showed ice-grey incursions, and the lines framing his mouth were carved down sharper than before.
“I remember too much and too well,” Chakotay said bluntly. The years had not been kind.
Harry acknowledged that with nothing more than a clipped nod, features impassive. Back on the U.S.S. Explorer, he’d quickly acquired a nickname. Emergency Holographic Engineer, EHE for short. And he’d perfected his unreadable façade since then.
“We don’t have much time,” he said. “’Fleet’s still trying to figure out which type of loose canon I am.”
The mere hint of a smile haunted Chakotay’s mouth. “Have you figured it out yet?”
“Yes. By now — yes, I have.” Harry leaned back in his chair. “The worst kind. That’s why I’m here.”
Chakotay’s gaze shifted subtly, alerting him to footsteps at his back. The waitress, of course. Harry improvised a suitably polite expression and ordered kava juice, freshly squeezed. Between them, they traded inconsequential remarks about the station’s cramped traffic schedule until the waitress had come and gone a second time.
“You’ve discovered a lead?” Chakotay asked, straight to the point, and it brought a fierce spark to his eyes that Harry found gratifying.
“Explorer was called back when we’d just finished searching the Niara sector,” he replied tersely, “I’ve narrowed the area down by another three parsecs meanwhile. Not much, but every bit helps.”
Chakotay glanced down at his hands that he’d folded on the tabletop, perhaps steeling himself for patience. A long breath heaved his shoulders. It mattered to him, Harry knew, it mattered deeply to Chakotay that Voyager’s crew be recovered, that each and every one of them should return to home soil and receive the resting place they would have chosen. A place where they could be remembered. The worst kind of return was still preferable to oblivion.
“We’ll find them,” Harry continued, careful not to let his voice rise with the starts of nervous energy that were coursing through him. “We won’t stop searching till we do.”
They saw eye to eye on this count. As for the rest, he had yet to find out.
“It’s bound to take time — but then we’ll need time to get ready...” When Chakotay raised his head again, Harry locked glances with him. He voiced the next few words with quiet emphasis. “To bring them back.”
Sharp awareness seized the other man’s expression. He’d instantly picked up on the implication. No, Harry wasn’t talking about recovering the bodies to give them a decent burial and, as ‘Fleet counselors invariably put it, find closure. Run through the proper grieving cycle. Let go. None of that crap.
“It can be done,” Harry said. “In time. Hear me out, okay?”
Chakotay narrowed his eyes, possibly scanning him for traces of a psychotic episode, a weakened hold on reality. Fine, so long as he listened.
“I woke up in a changed timeline once and made it back to the correct one,” Harry started, but Chakotay already held up a hand and broke his momentum.
“You’re talking about changing history, time travel, what?” His jaw squared, and the look in his eyes was fast approaching fury. Don’t get my hopes up if you can’t deliver, Harry guessed at the thought behind that look.
“A message back through time,” he answered. “Transmitting the right phase corrections. That’s all we need, and it’s a lot less complicated than people hopping timelines, though that’s been done on occasion.”
“Right.” Chakotay gave a snort, but his glance darkened. With disbelief, denial. And something else, maybe.
“The Department of Temporal Investigations has documented forty-two instances of time travel so far,” Harry specified. “But we’re not talking slingshot effect here, just communication.”
“With the past.” Chakotay’s tone had gained an edge that betrayed more than skepticism.
“On the Explorer,” Harry went on, “I spent every spare minute catching up on the latest developments in temporal mechanics. Verteron research still looks the most promising. But in any case, theoretical concepts already exist. They just need to be translated into technology.”
“Which the Federation will ban and prohibit in every possible way. There’s a law—”
“I know.” The Temporal Prime Directive, supplementary to the original Prime Directive. Which had been broken countless times since it came into effect. Harry pulled up his shoulders. “There are independent institutes. Cultures that don’t subscribe to the same set of rules.”
“Not to mention the Q,” Chakotay offered with a touch of sardonic humor.
“Someone out there is bound to construct the type of transmitter we want,” Harry persisted. “It’s a simple matter of probability. Give it five, ten years—”
“Ten years?” For a moment, startlement took over, and Chakotay’s hand flew up as if he’d reach out and shake Harry. But he recovered himself almost instantly. “This is your future, as you envision it?” he asked, in his softened counseling tone. “Ten years, maybe more, till you can—”
“Yes.” With a tight breath, Harry dropped the mask, the shield of calm dispassion he could keep up night and day, if needs be. And he took in Chakotay’s reaction — the quick recoil he couldn’t control, the wash of black grief that filled his gaze — with a certain cynical pleasure.
That’s right, this is what I am underneath. I can’t live like this.
He hadn’t miscalculated his move. Chakotay’s shoulders slumped, revealed the weight of grief, remorse, weariness, but his gaze grew thoughtful. Open to possibility. “Assuming,” he began, “just assuming for a moment that you’re right, and we can get our hands on this piece of technology, once it has been constructed—”
We, Harry noted with satisfaction that sent a quiver deep through his gut, and slipped the mask back into place.
“—there’s still more involved. The Directives exist for a reason.”
“And they’ve been bent for good reason, time and again,” Harry countered. He’d known Chakotay long enough to be prepared for this. For someone like him, ethical quandaries would always take precedence over technological or tactical snags.
“I’ve given a lot of thought to that,” Harry went on. “The Temporal Prime Directive exists to protect the future of the Federation within the known timeline. I don’t see how that would be affected if... if Voyager is saved.” He pressed his lips together, annoyed by the slight tremor that’d crept into his voice, and gave himself a moment to level out. “Yes, we brought a lot of useful data back from the Delta Quadrant, but that’s exactly what Voyager will eventually do, if we pull this off. And that’s all the relevance to the timeline so far. Between you and me, we haven’t made a significant impact on history since our return.”
Chakotay shifted his shoulders, consciously relaxing himself as he thought it through. There was no point in trying to push him. He’d make up his mind in his own time. After picking up his drink — a substance colored emerald-green, slightly viscous — for a long swig, he looked back at Harry. “Have you considered approaching Admiral Paris?”
The question took him like a blow to the chest, so hard and unexpected that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. He stared at Chakotay.
“Look, I know—” The other man swept up a hand, caught off balance for the first time since they’d started to talk. “Never mind,” he said in gruff tones of apology. “I don’t suppose an Admiral would ever bend the rules that far. Not even for the sake of his son.”
Harry reached for his glass to take a measured sip and another. Guiding himself back to the present, to the tart flavor of kava juice and the hairline scratches on the table’s glassy surface that remained invisible at most angles.
“No one else would, I suppose,” Chakotay added. “It’s one hell of a risk.”
His glance was shuttered now. Harry could feel him slip, pull away from the compelling conclusions. Damn the man for being such an addict to conscience, so determined to balance every singular need against the specter of a greater whole.
“How many times,” he asked and couldn’t stop the strain from showing through, “how many times did Captain Janeway choose that kind of risk, to save one of us — just one member of her crew, not the whole ship, not—”
“Leave Kathryn out of it,” Chakotay grated, a black temper gaining critical mass with his slight forward motion, as if he’d lunge across the table and grab Harry by the throat.
If that’s what it takes, be my guest. But Chakotay’s resistance got to him, undermined his carefully maintained composure that didn’t allow for minimal variance.
A point-four-two phase variance in the slipstream threshold, the words ran through his head, in a voice not his own, churning up from the mire that memory had become.
No less than he deserved, this cut to the quick. Part of him had been cauterized to the passage of time, the part that lived forever trapped on a fiery event horizon and still waited to be crushed, only that moment never came, never —
“Harry.”
It took an effort to wrench himself back, to reorganize his mind. He would’ve yanked it all out into the open, flung himself at Chakotay’s feet to grovel, if he’d believed it would help. But anything that showed him as unstable as the slipstream would eliminate his chances of persuading the man. Harry met his eyes and left the silence hanging.
Chakotay steepled his fingers, shaping a fragile cage of muscle and bone. “You’re determined to go through with it, no matter what I say.”
Hardly a question, but still an opening Harry knew he could use. “I need your help,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I can’t do this alone.”
Deliberately vague, but intense enough to appeal to Chakotay’s pronounced empathic streak. Chakotay could take it any way he wanted, as a plea for practical assistance or for spiritual guidance, Harry didn’t care — so long as he acted on it.
Chakotay nodded heavily. “I need to think about this. It’s not a decision I can make off the bat.”
“I know.”
For long moments, they sat in silence, finishing their drinks while strains of Bajoran lute music swirled around them. Finally, Chakotay set his glass down and looked about for the waitress — then his glance flew back to Harry. “What about the phase corrections? We don’t have the complete set of data for a reliable simulation, and slipstream technology isn’t available anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant.”
“I’ve downloaded everything from the Delta Flyer’s data banks, and I’ve worked on reconstructing the rest ever since I left Starfleet,” Harry told him with full confidence, no need to pretend. “Here’s what I’ve got so far. Check for yourself.” Leaning forward to mask the movement of his hand beneath the table, he slipped Chakotay a PADD safeguarding the essence of his plans and some preliminary results. “This is going to take time too — years, to be frank — but I’ve analyzed the error matrix, and I’ve already identified the general area where my calculations—”
“Alright,” Chakotay cut in, as if stopping him now could make any difference. Voiced or not, the fatal error had been Harry’s. The only thing he truly owned, in this timeline.
“Harry...” Chakotay’s tone warmed again, with an awkward sadness. “You’ve given me a lot to think about. And I will, I promise.”
“Thanks.” Even though he tried to keep it in check, keep it out of his voice, a deep tremor gripped him from the inside out. As if he’d brushed the edge of a warp field, a terrible energy pulling at him to just — let go. He closed his eyes and took a moment to steady his breathing.
“I’m buying...” With a quick signal to the waitress, Chakotay got up and rounded the table. He set a hand on Harry’s shoulder to give him a short, hard squeeze. “I’ll be in touch.”
Harry didn’t turn to watch him leave. No matter the extent of his doubts and qualms, Chakotay wouldn’t betray him to the authorities, wouldn’t alert the resident medics to a psychiatric emergency either. He’d never do that kind of thing without fair warning. Harry, I think you’ve gone quite mad and need instant help.
Rolling his empty glass between his palms, Harry allowed himself a thin smile. He’d planted the seed that was sure to raise wild notions and bring treasured memories close to the surface again, each now trailed by a sweet, haunting whisper: what if—?
Chakotay wouldn’t be able to resist any more than he had. Just give him time.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. CHALLENGER: STARDATE 71143.5
Challenger plowed along at sublight speed, riding shotgun across a big wide nothing. The edges of the Alpha Quadrant were desolate border territory where outlawed drugs, arms, cyborg implements and the like changed hands whenever Starfleet turned its back. At the time La Forge had been handed this mission, it’d looked straightforward enough, just about right to test his command abilities and draft a few choice enhancements to Challenger’s systems. He hadn’t expected to be sent after frantic guerillas plotting to mess with time — who would?
Sure, it had been done before. The Enterprise herself — the ship he still thought of as his home in deep space — had whiplashed through time on more than one occasion, but that was before the Temporal Prime Directive finally took effect. Besides, they’d invariably responded to external pressure, struggling to undo or prevent damage to continuity within a limited set of parameters — not retrofitting history to match individual needs. And here he was, charged with stopping two men who’d dug their heels into a chip of the past they’d claimed as their present while discounting everyone else’s present as an unwanted future. Temporal paradox, translating into human affliction.
La Forge turned his eyes back to the screen, currently crowded by five years’ worth of surveillance reports. 2381-2386: a relatively short span in the long and unforgiving memory of Starfleet Intelligence. But at some point, someone high up the ranks must’ve been bored to tears by accounts that relayed only mundane routines. Kim and Chakotay had maintained a loose contact, exchanged messages every once in a while, never saw much of each other. Nothing at all in their unremarkable civilian lives suggested they were plotting to assault spacetime integrity.
So much for the infallibility of Intelligence the Omniscient. Back to square one, start over from scratch. Nothing but motive could provide a lead now, La Forge figured, and began to dig into the daunting bulk of background material.
Reports on Kim were far more extensive than those concerning his confederate. Both men had submitted to counseling after their return from the Delta Quadrant, leaving behind their ship — the U.S.S. Voyager, NCC-74656 — presumably destroyed during an unprecedented experiment with quantum slipstream technology. One hundred fifty crew, dead. Due to a flaw in Ensign Kim’s calculations.
Kim, according to his medical files, had claimed responsibility with a suicidal fervor that led to a period of sedation at a secluded Federation clinic. When they pulled him from it, he was rational, cooperative, and eager to resume his service in Starfleet. Eventually, the board of psychiatric advisers logged a recommendation that Kim should be allowed to join the search for Voyager’s remains. A therapeutic measure neatly serving a double purpose: improve the patient’s condition and restore a gifted officer to Starfleet, all in one go. Command acted on the board’s advice, albeit after some debate.
Should have listened to the voices of warning... Well, hindsight was cheap coin. La Forge swiveled his chair, growing restless. No one emerged from a loss like that and remained sane. Especially if they considered themselves the root cause of the catastrophe.
In the absence of such a traceable guilt, Chakotay’s response to the disaster had been more balanced. He agreed to counseling at once and later sought — so the file stated without yielding additional clues — spiritual advice among his tribe’s elders on Dorvan Five.
La Forge skimmed the sections that detailed the presumed recovery process both men underwent and was glad to discover a succinct recap of Kim’s last known sessions with a civilian therapist. Dr. Jove-Atkinson, based in the Proxima Colony, had turned in her report at ‘Fleet Command’s request.
Mr. Kim first contacted me in 2383, she wrote. I agreed to see him immediately after perusing his biographical data in the public domain.
Had to be her Risian ancestry, La Forge supposed, making her bold. Most other therapists would have bolted from an emotional casualty of this magnitude. Dr. Jove-Atkinson, however, seemed to harbor a grudging admiration for her patient.
Mr. Kim was strikingly lucid and entirely capable of critical self-examination. He never disclaimed guilt as the dominant factor of his life, the driving force behind every personal choice. Therefore, he argued consistently, he could not abandon guilt without simultaneously depriving himself of all creative energies — or, in his own words, ‘without cutting himself off from life support’.
Obsessed, La Forge translated. Most of the madness in the universe could probably be traced back to dysfunctions of this sort, when one single factor corroded connections and complexities and closed itself in an endless loop. Hell. He scratched his fingernails through his close-cropped beard. And they had to drop this in his lap... La Forge caught himself wishing he could contact Troi and get her opinion on the doctor’s report.
The diagnosis I recorded after the initial evaluation period may be rare, but will, I believe, prove tenable under scrutiny. By the time I met him, Mr. Kim had turned a posttraumatic stress disorder into the foundation of his revised self-perception, thereby managing to reintegrate conflicting aspects of his psyche. Consequently, he suffered none of the usual symptoms, such as recurring flashbacks, hyperarousal, amnesia or avoidance of specific memories (with one conceivable exception, as below). Mr. Kim was at all times capable of supporting himself by running a highly successful business. His physical condition rated above average, despite minor neural and metabolic deficits due to sustained stress. These were treated with the appropriate medication.
Once I learned about Mr. Kim’s musical talent, I proposed previously untried avenues of addressing the complex psychodynamics. Music therapy has long been established as a highly successful method of improving patients’ mental and emotional health. Mr. Kim declined, however, pointing out that this specific activity was forever linked to his memories of Voyager.
La Forge tipped his seat back and folded his arms. He could relate to that response too damned well. The mere mention of Sherlock Holmes still set him on edge, eleven years later. He couldn’t see himself ever running that program again, without Data. By all accounts, Harry Kim had reacted like a normal human being for once. Even if it fazed his doctor.
In consequence, I resorted to standard techniques of conversational therapy. We specifically discussed the sequence of events preceding Mr. Kim’s unfortunate miscalculation and the catastrophe that ensued. In the process, I focused on gauging Mr. Kim’s emotional responses, with special attention to interpersonal attachments which typically exacerbate grief and survivor guilt.
In response to my queries, Mr. Kim detailed his relations with various commanding officers, crewmates and friends, omitting only one fellow officer, even though this person had played a substantial part in the disastrous events. The omission seemed significant enough to address it directly. At first, Mr. Kim failed to show any response. Finally, he offered a most opaque reply, excused himself, and walked out of my office. On the following day, I received a note conveying his decision to discontinue our sessions. I have not seen him or heard from him since.
In an effort to analyze the causes of my failure to provide successful therapy for Mr. Kim, I repeatedly revisited the recording of our last conversation (appended to this file). In brief, I believe he decided to terminate treatment the instant we identified a lead to the traumatic core event. The fellow officer in question is doubtless among the casualties aboard Voyager.
Friend, La Forge guessed, thoughts flashing back to his years aboard the Enterprise. Then again, friendship couldn’t account for a refusal to mention or recall the other man’s name. A rival maybe? Among a crew as small as that, isolated in an unknown sector of space, petty jealousies and personality clashes were bound to grow out of proportion. Perhaps some unresolved conflict had turned into the singular focus of overwhelming regret — but whatever the trouble behind it, it would never be resolved now.
La Forge started the vid that Kim’s therapist had included in her report and listened for a good half hour as Dr. Jove-Atkinson led her patient down memory lane, encouraging him to reiterate moments of high risk, humor or closeness that he’d shared with his crewmates. An emotionally healthy person would’ve broken down at some point. Kim didn’t, he delivered his descriptions blank-faced, pulling all kinds of details from meticulous recollection. La Forge discovered on the side that the late Captain Janeway had occasionally indulged a passion for holodeck sims featuring 19th-century settings. Kim didn’t smile as he divulged that — he never seemed to smile at all — nor did his composure crack at this or any other moment during the therapeutic session. There was something chilling to the man’s detachment. To the way he timed his responses, his grating silences.
Fatigued and slightly unnerved, La Forge checked the timecode. The vid was drawing to a close. Kim had just mentioned a holodeck scenario created by the conn officer, when the doctor sprang her trap.
“You mention Voyager’s pilot quite frequently,” she remarked, “yet you don’t refer to him by name. Would you care to explain why that is?”
Kim’s expression changed only to reach the next level of blank, like a death-mask. He’d been comfortably seated all along, leaning forward, hands loosely linked between his knees. Now he stirred and drew breath to reply, but nothing came. Another extended silence filled with small background noises, the chirp of a comm link in another room. Kim glanced down, and his grip on himself grew white-knuckled. When he finally replied, a marked change in his tone betrayed... something.
“Tom. We. Never.”
Low and rough, as if strained by some crushing force. Each word spaced apart by the short breaths that lifted Kim’s shoulders.
Tense enough to snap, La Forge thought, and found himself in agreement with the doctor’s view that a turning point of some sort had been reached. A moment later, Kim levered himself from the chair, gave a short nod — “I have to go, please excuse me, Doctor” — and exited recording range.
Not much of a lead there. But he had to follow up on it anyway, so La Forge keyed for Voyager’s crew manifest, last updated in 2375. The officer in question turned out to be Lieutenant Tom Paris, Admiral’s son, former convict, originally a tag-along to Voyager’s mission — an ‘observer’ in formal parlance — before Captain Janeway granted him a field commission and handed him the conn. Blond, narrow-faced, a hint of cynical detachment haunting his picture-perfect smile.
Troublemaker, La Forge concluded after browsing the man’s checkered record. Pit his type against a model officer like Ensign Kim, and you were bound to see trouble somewhere down the line. But that was as far as speculation could take him. La Forge leaned back in his chair. Who knew, if he found himself in a position to negotiate with Kim and Chakotay, this scrap of information might lend him some leverage. Assuming the two suspended their madness long enough to negotiate. Assuming, moreover, that it happened to be his lucky day.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52141.7
A reverberant hum filled Main Engineering, rising up and up, like a groundtide through a well, until it spilled across the upper gallery. Harry kept his eyes fixed to the energy signature on the screen. The spreading ripples pulled at him to swing around and watch the slipstream drive come online at last, a pull so strong he had to brace against it. Hazy reflections shimmered across the wall panels, changing color, shifting angles...
That can’t be right. In reflex, Harry thrust out a hand for balance. On the very edge of sight, hard lines and angles seemed to shiver, and the spiking signal he’d monitored was overlaid by a strange echo, an altered curve — not visible so much as imprinting itself on his mind, like a retinal afterimage. He blinked rapidly, and yes, it was gone, everything back to normal, except for a strange giddy sensation that lingered at the back of his head.
“Exit trial run,” B’Elanna announced from the main deck below, “powering down now!” — and the ripples subsided again, giving way to the distant thrum of impulse engines.
As scheduled, the test run finished after ten seconds total, just enough for the slipstream to form and exert its strain on the main deflector. Internal diagnostics could take it from there, pick out fractional imbalances or discrepancies, if there were any.
Harry scrubbed a hand over his eyes. From the buzz of excited voices on the lower level, he guessed that the trial had been a success, and the data trailing across the screen on his left all seemed to confirm that.
“How’re we doing?” B’Elanna called as she dashed along the gallery, a few minutes later.
“Good.” Harry stepped back to let her take a look at the first outpouring of diagnostics. “No problems with the deflector geometry so far.” It would take the computer a while yet to sift through all the data, generate detailed statistics and extrapolate the necessary specs for sustained slipstream flight.
B’Elanna grinned and turned around to admire the glistening column that housed a new set of volatile energies. “This is going to work.”
“Say,” Harry started, not quite sure how to put it, “did you notice anything like, well, a minor distortion effect?”
Her eyes narrowed instantly. “No, nothing — what’re you saying?”
“Maybe it was just me. I felt... a little dizzy for a moment.”
“No one else mentioned anything unusual, but I’ll look into it.” B’Elanna cocked her head, quick concern pushing through her excitement. “Could be that you’re overworked, Harry. We’ve been at it practically nonstop for days.”
Before she could suggest sickbay as his next stop, Harry shook his head. “No, I’m fine. I’ll make sure to get a good night’s sleep before we launch.”
B’Elanna took a moment to skim the diagnostics output, murmured “great, just great,” but her eyes were drawn back to the reaction chamber. “Analyzing and implementing all the data will take us another twenty-four, thirty-six hours at most, and after that...” Her tone changed, grew breathless with an impatience that made her eyes glitter. “I think we’re all set to go!”
When she straightened, she flashed him the brilliant smile that had to make her the most beautiful woman aboard Voyager. Harry smiled back at her. No wonder, he told himself yet again, no wonder that Tom had lowered his defenses after all and let himself fall in love.
Two hours later, they were checking isolinear circuitry and rerouting auxiliary power in the observation area. B’Elanna had already sent her crew to dinner when the systems display station registered minor fluctuations. The wear and tear of years without access to proper replacements had shown its teeth once more.
Harry sent a distracted glance into the corridor as he checked an adjoining circuit with the magneton scanner. No one else in Engineering, as it turned out, had noticed that faint distorting ripple. A dizzy spell, he explained it to himself, if it wasn’t hyperactive imagination. They’d all worked hard and slept little, these past couple of weeks. And here was their reward, all but confirmed by warp core diagnostics: a perfectly focused quantum field. Another day, and they’d ride the slipstream all the way to the Alpha Quadrant.
With a deep breath, Harry lowered his scanner. He could feel the reality draw close and take hold, like an electric bow wave that rewired his nervous system. After four years, two months, eleven days, they’d be going home.
“I said, status of the sensor interface?” B’Elanna nudged him with her elbow and chuckled. “Hey, get your mind out of Alpha, we’re not there yet.”
No place like home... Harry ducked his head, read the results off the display, and applied his scanner to the next circuit. A troubled little knot twitched in his stomach. During his first months aboard, he’d dreamed himself back home every night. Awake or asleep, he’d burrowed into the comfort of recollection, imagined the delight of returning till he could almost taste it. Four years ago. At twenty-six, he’d lived through an odd number of staggering crises and reversals, step by step he’d readjusted, but he’d never let go. It was only when the slipstream drive evolved, promising a shortcut across thousands of lightyears, that he found himself trapped between polar energies. One desire at odds with the other, straining him to the limit the closer they got...
“So tell me.” B’Elanna slapped an access panel into place, picked up her hyperspanner and straightened. “What’s the first thing you’re gonna do, back on Earth?”
“Just one thing?” Harry stalled. Unlike himself, B’Elanna couldn’t hope for a family reunion. Making that happen would be like piecing the fragments of a long-ago detonation back together, the ragged edges so worn-off they no longer fit.
“Yeah. After meeting up with your folks and trading all the news.” Her lopsided smile showed no trace of envy.
“Well, that’s going to take weeks.” Harry paused. Too many things piled into his head all at once, most of them too quirky and private to explain. “I think I’ll spend a whole day on the beach. There’s nothing like an early morning dip in the ocean, when the sun’s just breaking the horizon.” He pulled up his shoulders. “How about you?”
“Not sure yet.” B’Elanna pursed her lips. “Don’t laugh, okay, but I think I’ll go for the grand tour of the Warp Physics Institute... assuming I can wrangle the proper clearance level from Starfleet.”
“’Fleet’s going to hand you a lot more than that,” Harry predicted at once. “Wait and see, they’ll beg you to accept a permanent position with R&D.”
“Don’t be too sure!” She tossed her head, defiant humor at full display. “Once a Maquis, always a Maquis. Federation authorities can still press charges against me, if they’re feeling vindictive.”
“No way,” Harry protested, the mere notion getting his blood up.
“Save it till you’re asked to testify for me!” B’Elanna grinned. “I’m not too worried.” But instead of resuming work, she sent a thoughtful look across the half-lit expanse of Engineering.
“Any other plans?” Harry asked and received only a quizzical glance in return that made him add, a little awkwardly, “I mean. You and Tom.”
She gave a shrug. “Oh, you know him — he’s not about to plan for the future, he’ll just wait till it happens.”
“There’s the matter of his prison sentence, too. Officially, he’s only out on parole.”
“There’s that.” B’Elanna changed the settings of her ‘spanner, then changed them again. “Has he said—?” But before Harry could begin to frame a reply, her hand landed on his shoulder. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”
“It’s alright.” He released a quick breath.
“How you two get along so well, I’ll never know.” Suddenly B’Elanna eyed him with an unsettling amount of speculation. “Or maybe I do. You’re all patience—”
Harry shook his head and chuckled, covering a stir of discomfort.
“Check against me, Starfleet. Sure you are,” she said with a tight little smile. “I suppose you just... balance each other out.”
“Well, if you put it that way,” Harry tried for a lighter tone, “I guess it all comes down to equilibrium thermodynamics.” According to the same law, nothing ever changed in the bigger picture, only microscopic processes were subject to fluctuation. He was glad when B’Elanna dropped the subject and turned about.
“Now!” she said briskly. “It’s the power coupling down here that keeps acting up. If I can’t find the proper components in one of those crates that’ve taken over my office, I’ll alert Carey. But let me check first.”
As her steps trailed metallic echoes down the deck, Harry gave his scanner a blank stare. One more time. Sensor interface, forward power grid, graviton generators...
He was still in the middle of it when slight noises registered at his back. Down the corridor, ‘lift doors hissed, followed by quick footsteps. Perhaps B’Elanna had paged Carey after all.
“Right with you,” Harry murmured without looking up.
“Oh, I’d hope so!”
Tom’s voice. He turned with a start.
Tom leaned against the open blast door, arms folded, watching him with an air of resigned amusement. “You forgot.”
“Forgot. Oh.” Captain Proton. “Damn, I’m sorry.” Harry pulled a face, gestured at the litter of tools and components on the deck, and from one moment to the next, he couldn’t wait to be off. “Hang on, okay? Let me just complete this one scan, won’t take more than a minute...”
“Sure.” A look like relief crossed Tom’s face, but couldn’t quite erase the tension underneath.
Harry kept half an eye on his friend as he worked. B’Elanna? he wondered. The ground between her and Tom seemed to shift time and again, but whatever the current status of their relationship was, active or suspended, Harry couldn’t tell. At some point during the final stage of constructing their slipstream drive, he’d lost track.
All the signs spelled trouble, hard and clear. The night before, Tom had shown up in his quarters with a hangdog look, in need of some peace and quiet, as he put it, and maybe some music, why not. When he’d dumped himself on the couch, Harry brought out his clarinet and played for a while. It hadn’t lessened the tension though, not by much. So Harry finally stopped trying.
I can almost hear you think, he’d said, inviting conversation, if Tom wanted one.
But Tom had slipped him only a tired sidelong glance. Am I distracting you? Sorry.
Always, was what Harry couldn’t say and hid behind a reassuring smile.
Perhaps tonight, after Captain Proton had taken out some of the pressure, Tom would tell him what the trouble was.
“Harry, do you remember where I put the—” B’Elanna turned the corner, her arms full of components and connectors.
“Hey.” Tom gave her a bright smile. “Mind if I kidnap Harry for an hour or two?”
B’Elanna dropped her payload into a crate, several clips and screws spilling to the floor, and cursed softly. “What for? Can’t be problems with helm control again.”
With a quick step towards her, Harry bent to collect a runaway screw.
“No, actually,” Tom said in his most offhanded tone. “We’re overdue for a break, and I’d booked holodeck time for the next chapter of Captain Proton, as of 2100. Harry was supposed to meet me fifteen minutes ago.”
B’Elanna bounced to her feet. “You were going to — what?”
“You heard me alright.” An angry flush was starting to color Tom’s cheeks. “What about it?”
“Oh. Nothing. Nothing at all.” B’Elanna threw out her hands to indicate the whole of Engineering. “We’re only fooling around with our petty little experiment here. But we can get back to that any time we want, can’t we? No pressure.”
Her sarcasm grew more trenchant by the second. Harry switched off his scanner and stepped aside. It hurt to see them like that, it always did, but he’d tried to play peacemaker before and learned from the experience.
“Look.” Tom’s jaw clenched, the way it usually did when he was fighting his temper back down. “If there’s anything I can do.”
“Run your sims,” B’Elanna said curtly, tossing the words over her shoulder. Hard to tell if she was referring to Captain Proton now, or the slipstream simulation. Tom had worked on the latter without much of a break for the past week, but — barring an update with the trial run’s results — it was all set up and fine-tuned, just waiting to be activated.
For long moments, Tom stared at B’Elanna’s back as if willing her to turn, come around and offer a compromise, or even the hint of one. But she wouldn’t, she was busy calling up schematics, her eyes glued to the screen. Tom’s glance darkened and slipped aside. Weariness gripped his face and made Harry fumble for an inspired remark that could turn the mood — though of course such a thing didn’t exist.
“Well, Harry?” B’Elanna shot him a backward glance, her tone rough with disappointment.
They were both watching him now, like the missing piece that could skew the balance — or even set it right. Absurd, but not more so than the whole argument had been. Try for compromise, reason counseled. Try and fail.
“I could be back here by—”
“Right.” B’Elanna gave a quick toss of the head. “Don’t bother. I’ve got work to do.”
She’d dismissed them with that, her response no worse than Harry had expected. Apologies wouldn’t make a difference now, they’d get around to that later. Once B’Elanna’s temper had settled again, clearing the air between them never took long.
“Let’s go.” Tom had moved close to his side, his features pale and every bit as tight as his voice had been.
Harry gave a nod and subdued an impulse to touch his arm or lay a hand on his shoulder. Free and easy as Tom generally was with physical contact, there were moments when Harry felt sure he couldn’t tolerate even the slightest touch. As if it would interfere with a high-strung balance of contradicting forces, and all too likely unsettle them.
When they reached the turbolift, Tom let his head fall back. The control panel flashed, sliding colored lights across his throat.
“Oh, hell,” he said quietly.
But the moment Harry opened his mouth to offer something reassuring — or even something as hopelessly naive as I want you to be happy — Tom flashed him a tense, irreverent grin, and the ‘lift arrived.
As he stepped into the cabin, Harry glanced back at B’Elanna, bent over the systems display, hands balled into fists. The closing doors narrowed the view to a strip, then a mere fissure.
Tom stood with his hands clasped behind his back. “Look, if you—”
“No. I needed a break myself, I just didn’t realize.”
For another moment, Tom regarded him closely, then shook his head. “Geez, Harry, someone’s bound to take advantage of you, if you don’t watch it.”
“Only when I let them,” Harry said mildly. “So what’s the next chapter?”
“What, you think I’m going to spoil the surprise?” Tom’s grin returned, brighter this time. “Wait and see, Harry, wait and see.”
A mere spark of the bristling energy showed, the kind that fired all over the place, once Tom made his appearance as Proton. Somehow the lack of color always made it more visible.
It wouldn’t, Harry acknowledged, make a lot of sense to anyone else in the crew, much less thirty-six hours away from their journey home. Captain Proton was a piece of outrageous, anachronistic fun — the Doctor called it a frivolous fantasy — and yet more than that, but he couldn’t have explained it to B’Elanna.
You had to see for yourself, and then it was impossible to miss, the way Tom cast himself adrift. To a world full of wild mysteries, to the overblown fantasies of another era, out of place and time. For all the roadblocks life had thrown his way, Tom could still lose himself in the game with the enthusiasm of a kid just bursting the shell towards a thousand possibilites. Kicking them about till they multiplied. It was contagious, and the only relief Harry thought he could find, in this strange divide between times.
“Your eyes are glazing over,” Tom murmured, close by his ear, when the turbolift stopped.
Harry shrugged. “After a fourteen-hour shift, I need something to energize me.”
“Ah. We’ll see about that.” Tom chuckled and placed a hand against the small of his back to steer him along. To pull him out of the present.
∞ ∞ ∞
FEDERATION COLONY MENZARA III
When Harry stepped off his transport, warm, humid air enfolded him with a myriad scents that made it hard to breathe. Jungle atmosphere. Lush greenery everywhere, a network of rivers and watercourses. Chakotay had chosen a facsimile of his homeworld to settle down, and the likeness made Harry’s skin crawl. He hadn’t talked to Chakotay in person for two years.
The first subspace message though, the message that clinched everything, had come in seventeen weeks and three days after their meeting on Deep Space Nine.
I’m sorry it took me a while to get back to you. Finding a place that suits my needs and settling in has kept me busy. Take a look at the coordinates, and you’ll see why. It’s a good place to be. Yes, Harry, we should make time for the trip around the Mutara Nebula you suggested. But come and visit me first. I’d like you to see my new quarters.
Too bland a message to rouse suspicions. Chakotay had kept his tone even, almost casual by his standards, but his mouth twitched when he said yes and we should make time. Harry could tell why, he’d thumped his console during a moment of breathtaking relief.
Chakotay’s current coordinates were part of the unspoken promise. Menzara III was a small Federation colony, far out on the fringes of the Alpha Quadrant, but it also placed him near the region where Starfleet had abandoned the search for Voyager. As near to it as they could dare.
Harry played the message three times. After that, he devised an encryption code that punched out certain key phrases and replaced them with chatter, so they could at least alert each other to vital developments whenever necessary.
The first thing they’d agreed on was to keep a low profile, keep their communications down to a minimum and in vague terms. Their plans ran years ahead of time. During these intermediate years, ‘Fleet Command had to be convinced that Voyager’s sole survivors were finally starting over. Intelligence kept tabs on them, of course. To deflect suspicion, Harry had made appointments with a civilian therapist of mixed Risian and Terran descent, sparing her a precious hour every week. With part of the profits his company made, he’d also set up a trust funding education for orphans who’d lost their families to deep space travel. Atonement. He imagined the sage nods his former counselors would give, when they found out.
Chakotay, on his part, had chosen the kind of retreat that suited a repentant dropout, in need of coming home to himself. A humble, hands-on existence as aquaponics farmer, embracing the healing powers of nature. And it looked disturbingly real, Harry had to admit when he arrived at the residence.
On the outside, the cluster of low-slung buildings revealed no technological implements whatsoever. Harry climbed the porch and gave the wooden door a rap of his knuckles. No door-chime either, and no surveillance that he could detect.
As soon as the door swung inward, he wanted to back away. A waft of cooking scents hung in the air, and from somewhere at the back of the house, a female voice called, “Chakotay, the door!” But he was already there, holding it open.
Harry glanced past the man’s shoulder, not at his face. “Bad timing. I shouldn’t intrude.”
“Don’t be so quick to judge. Come on in.”
Perhaps part of him still responded to the voice of a superior officer, perhaps he was just tired. It had been a long trip. Harry let himself be taken down the hall and noticed the comfortable look of it all, the scatter of personal items, the little touches that breathed attachment, pleasure. It was possible that Chakotay had set up his cover a little too perfectly, that he’d grown into it, or let it grow past illusion and into reality. Wouldn’t take long to find out, Harry supposed.
The living area was spacious and uncluttered. Midmorning light streamed in through the windows and a set of patio doors. Harry breathed out in relief when he spotted an elegant array of processors, control panels, interfaces. Even a replicator.
Chakotay turned to give him a sharp once-over. “Harry. You look—”
It wasn’t like him to stumble over trivial comments of this sort, or to catch himself repeating what he already knew.
“You don’t,” Harry retorted, unsmiling. Outdoor life had returned the bronze tone to Chakotay’s face and hands, and at some point the wear of time had relented. Harry met his eyes for a challenge that ought to flush him out, clear up the matter of growing too comfortable inside the wrong skin. “Well. Survivor guilt is curable. Guilt over murder is not.”
Chakotay’s eyes narrowed at the word murder. They’d argued about this, back in 2375, it was heavily mined terrain. “Have you allowed yourself some reprieve, ever?”
Harry wondered what he meant. Alcohol, a lapse into depression, mood enhancers, sexual escapades? Since Starfleet had cleared him for duty again, he’d denied himself everything that might distract him from the work he needed to do. And a few other things, perhaps, because he didn’t deserve them. Still, he worked out regularly, and his routine bioscans showed him in good shape overall. Fully functional.
“You’re Christian, Harry. Are you familiar with the ancient Judas legend? It’s apocryphal, but revealing.”
He shook his head. That Chakotay would try spiritual avenues for alleviation came as no surprise, only that he’d apparently broadened his religious horizon.
“Once a year,” Chakotay elaborated, “Judas was released from the fires of hell to spend a single day on an isolated rock in the ocean, to breathe air instead of sulphur and listen to the waves instead of souls screaming in torment.”
Harry’s mouth twisted. “Cute story.”
“It’s an open question whether the reprieve lightened his burden or made it worse to bear.” Chakotay gave his shoulder a brief clap. “You decide.”
Belatedly, Harry realized that Chakotay had intended to provoke him in turn. He took it as a warning, alerting him to how inept he’d become at human communication. Yet this was why Chakotay covered the interpersonal angle of their collaborative information-gathering, while Harry conversed with machines, fluent in both binary and trinary but not much else.
Chakotay took a step towards the patio doors that opened onto a sprawling garden.
“There is no cure, Harry,” he answered the unspoken question. “No cure for memory, not that I’d want one.” When he turned around, his glance aimed unspoken grievance at Harry. “So. You’re here. Try to relax.”
Outside in the damp green, the local species of cicada began a lazy, rasping chant. Harry pushed his hands into his jacket’s pockets and cast about — colored rugs, a sofa, a couple of recliners all suggested ease and comfort — when footsteps approached from the western wing of the house. Chakotay’s companion entered a moment later. A tall, lanky woman dressed in oil-stained coveralls, still wiping her hands on a rag. Dark-haired, pale-skinned — and so very young.
“Tessa Omond,” Chakotay introduced. The smile he sent her way smoothed out some major tension lines.
“Harry.” Tessa held out a hand, grimaced at the black smear that covered her fingers, and pulled it back. “Good to meet you at last,” she said anyway. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Afraid I can’t say the same.” Harry drew up his shoulders.
She smiled at him, unfazed.
“Tessa’s got a degree in exoarchaeology,” Chakotay began to make up for past omissions. “She’s currently employed with the local administration...”
“Most of the time, I get to shuttle debris back and forth,” she inserted. “Part-time pilot, part-time mechanic. It’s been over a year since I last joined a dig.”
“I see,” Harry offered. It had been some time since he’d last had to engage in idle conversation with a stranger. Her no-nonsense attitude, and the fact that she was in no way affiliated with Starfleet, came as a relief.
Tessa let him study her a moment longer, then she tucked the rag into her belt. “Well. You’ve got things to discuss, and I’ve got a job to finish. I’ll see you later, Harry.”
She was off again with that, but something about the way she carried herself, about her brisk, vibrant stride reminded him of —
“Let’s go outside.” Chakotay touched his elbow. “I’d like to show you around, and the weather’s clearing up, too.”
In silence, Harry followed him out through the slide doors. Memory was a gutpunch he kept inflicting on himself at the worst of times.
Out in the open, he snatched a shallow breath. Scents of recent rainfall washed around him, as if he’d missed a thunderstorm while inside, the climate almost reminiscent of South Carolina. He hadn’t visited his parents in eight months, thirteen days.
“Farming grounds pick up behind the corilla trees over there,” Chakotay pointed out. Beyond a stretch of marginally tended grass, the ground sloped and disintegrated into green islets encircled by water. One wing of the residence had been built on wooden pillars, straddling a little creek.
“I’ve set up a small-scale project to develop new harvesting techniques,” Chakotay continued as they paced off the perimeter. “Something to explain why I’m keeping track of advanced technologies. Occasional trips to other colonies are part of it too. The trade routes are a goldmine for information.”
Sooner or later, his experience with the Maquis, with living outside the law and tapping inofficial communication channels, was bound to pay off. Harry nodded and tilted his head at a low, distant rumble, perhaps the last ripple of a storm. The clouds were breaking up, baring scraps of a scintillant sky. Water sounds purled all around them.
Beside a compact thermal sequencer, half-hidden among a clutch of trees, Chakotay paused. Eyes front, shoulders squared, he echoed a pose that belonged to emergency briefings. Harry curled his fingers against a cold trickle of anticipation.
“I’ve discovered something worth looking into...” Chakotay waved a hand at the start of impatience he must have shown. “Ten days ago, Harry. I thought it could wait until you’d arrived.”
“Right.” Why take unnecessary risks? But Chakotay couldn’t understand how some days dragged like billows of dark matter, with all the draining force of sheer mass.
“I accompanied Tessa to a conference on Rigel IV,” he went on. “They’ve hosted annual congregations of exoarchaeologists ever since—”
“The short version?” Harry prompted.
“A team based on Mantilles dropped out of warp in the Takara sector by accident, where their sensors registered some inexplicable readings.”
“Takara sector?” Harry frowned, tracing reference points across a mental map. “That’s outside the Alpha Quadrant, close to—”
“Yes. Less than five parsecs from the coordinates where Starfleet last searched for Voyager.” A subtle change lit Chakotay’s face, like the outline of a smoldering shadow. “Their readings showed traces of duranium and bioneural circuitry.”
“What? Where?” Harry burst out. A surge of white noise crowded into his head and threatened his sense of balance. “In space?”
“On an uninhabited class-L planet,” Chakotay answered him, tight-lipped, as if he was holding his breath in. “Starfleet records show no mission that could explain the presence of these materials in the sector. At least the records I’ve been able to access don’t.”
One breath and another, till the drowning noise faded, made way for logic. “But. Those archaeologists. Didn’t they—?”
“Inform Starfleet?” Chakotay guessed and shook his head. “They were hired by a civilian corporation that prefers to avoid official attention. They weren’t scheduled to enter the sector in the first place and wrote it off as a sensor malfunction.”
“Good,” Harry said through clenched teeth. The possibility, slight as it was, kept haunting him. That by sheer, dumb chance, Starfleet should discover Voyager’s location ahead of them and mount a mission to recover the ship and her crew. Find them and bury them. “I’ll check ‘Fleet’s databanks for covert operations anywhere near the Takara sector. When I get back.”
And he wished he could leave right away, access a system with all the necessary camouflage routines in place. Unrest worked through his insides like a virus. Harry caught his hands into fists and let his head fall back. Daylight spilled through the wide green fans overhead and fractured into rainbow colors.
Don’t, he repeated to himself, in a voice as thin as hindsight, don’t get your hopes up. It was all hearsay, reported by civilians who’d likely taken no more than a passing glance at sensor data that made little sense to them.
“It’s a lead, not more,” Chakotay said in a forced dry tone. “At least there is next to no traffic in the Takara sector.”
“A single solar system, two borderline habitable planets, no valuable resources,” Harry pulled the data from his head. “No indications of sentient species or civilization either.” He’d memorized the basic facts about all twenty-seven sectors that qualified as potential crash sites years ago.
The Takara sector was a set of blips and angles, committed to Federation charts during the early exploration period. Nothing to set fire to the imagination. All the same, the name went round and round in his head, beating out a slow, haunted rhythm.
Chakotay motioned him along, up and down a narrow footpath that approached the residence from the western side. Large ferns brushed their thighs at every step and left damp stains on their trousers.
“That’s Tessa’s workshop up there.” Chakotay tipped his chin towards a structure built from local stone. “I met her when I needed help with shuttling some equipment across continents.”
Harry recognized the opening, inviting questions — or if not that, acknowledgment of some kind — but all he could think to say was, “She’s so... young.”
Chakotay gave him a strange, sad smile. “You’ve got three years on her, Harry, not more.”
As the planet went through its brief rotation cycle and afternoon swept in, Tessa joined them by a sprawling lagoon at the heart of the farm. All their conversation was focused on growing and harvesting procedures. Harry threw in some comments on the latest developments in biofiltration while the rest of his mind was elsewhere engaged.
He watched them together, Chakotay and Tessa, with the eyes of a sentinel. With suspicion that tainted his observations, but he couldn’t change that. Their plans to save Voyager, should they fail, featured a ninety-nine-point-seven percent chance of their deaths in this timeline, where nothing rooted them. If Chakotay was throwing down roots now, Harry was on his own. To all intents and purposes, he had been on his own for years, but he needed Chakotay to set the plan in motion and carry it through. There was no alternative, no conceivable replacement. Only the clinically — and criminally — insane would consent to wiping out a decade or more. A folie à deux, wasn’t that the proper term? He needed Chakotay to share it with him, no one else could.
And here was the comfortable residence, the farm, the uncomplicated relationship with Tessa fitting itself right in, like a natural feature. Harry took a long, dark look around and wanted to call Computer, arch! to terminate an alarming illusion.
After dinner, Tessa took him back into the garden where they settled on weather-beaten deck chairs. Chakotay had done all the cooking, no replicators involved, and now went for a bottle of wine. Dusk was an arresting affair on Menzara III, swathes of transparent blue edged with gold that infused the coloring of fruit trees, shrubs and ferns, so lovely it made Harry’s teeth clench. Clear skies overhead, the color of —
“Harry.” Tessa extended a hand to him without touching. “I’m with you. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Instead of trying for protest that was sure to come out lame, he gave a shrug.
“Chakotay told me, before we got... seriously involved.” Tessa chose her words with painstaking care. “Our relationship is based on that condition.”
“On condition of what?” Her implications might be transparent, but Harry needed rock-solid fact.
“On condition that I either join you two on your mission,” she specified in the same calm tones, “or do nothing whatsoever to impede or endanger it. I’m inclined to go with the former, but that’s still a matter of negotiation between him and me.”
There was an ironic spark to her smile that set Harry at ease — as much as he could be at ease these days. These years that slipped by and still rubbed him raw.
“Thank you,” he said, his breath going out in a rush, “I appreciate that. It means...”
“Everything, I know.” Tessa’s glance slid aside, perhaps to grant him privacy. “Life, home, sanity. This—” Her quick gesture encompassed the grounds, the residence and went as far out as the sky, “—is a surrogate. I want him to have the real thing.”
Harry bowed his head. There was a passion underneath her calm, dry tones — no, more, a hint of excitement — at the prospect of eliminating the parameters of her own living. A different man might have taken it as proof that miracles did occur, from time to time. For Harry, it was enough to acknowledge the distinct possibility of a folie à trois.
As evening deepened around them, he sipped on dark red wine and mentally assigned himself a recreational period of six unbroken hours.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52142.6
There’d never been a day like this aboard Voyager. The celebration wound in and out of the corridors of Decks Nine through Eleven, swirled to eddies in Engineering where the vibrant mood and the flush of voices made their own kind of music. Harry breathed it in, held it in.
No place like home. He’d carried that phrase in his head for so long. His unfading incentive, his lifeline. And now it had come within reach again, dancing at his fingertips with a restless tingle. Tomorrow. And then all this — all this will be over...
He walked among his crewmates, read the dazzled expectation in their faces. With some of them he’d never exchanged more than a few words, and when they called out “aren’t you excited?” he answered with a smile and a nod, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop anywhere for long. Cheers and applause erupted around the reactor core when B’Elanna burst a champagne bottle on the handrail, confetti raining down from the gallery.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain’s voice cut through the noise. “May I introduce the next generation of interstellar propulsion, the Quantum Slipstream Drive...”
Only another twelve hours, Harry thought, swept up into the mood, then all the waiting will be over. At last. Like an aimless tide, the party flowed this way and that, and a gentle daze settled over him. Even though he’d barely sipped on his champagne.
In search of a quiet corner, he drifted back towards the observation area where he’d spotted Tom a while ago. And Tom was still there, like a stubborn disturbance in the overall flow, bent over the systems display, in exactly the same spot where they’d left B’Elanna the night before. Completely focused on the glowing schematics, as if the noise and excitement all around him didn’t exist.
Harry watched with amusement as Seven tottered past, clutching the Doctor’s arm. A buzzed Borg drone was something else. But when he turned towards Tom — high time for him to join the celebration, Harry thought — unexpected complications swept it all from his head.
Tom had run a warp core diagnostic. And he’d discovered a phase variance — point-four-two, nothing much — in the slipstream threshold. An Edsel, a disaster waiting to happen, he called it, pale-faced and short-tempered, while Harry wondered about his state of mind more than the problem he’d identified.
“Tom, if it’ll make you feel better, we’ll go to the holodeck right now,” he offered, “run a few more simulations. It’s probably just a sensor glitch.”
He was still readjusting when the noise faded to mere rumor at their back and the turbolift caught them up in a humming quiet. Tom rubbed the balls of his hands together and stared at the control panel as if willing the ‘lift to go faster.
“Why a warp core diagnostic?” Harry asked. He had to start somewhere, if he was going to track down the cause that’d left Tom at odds with the ship-wide burst of excitement. “What made you think B’Elanna didn’t—”
“They initiated diagnostics yesterday,” Tom cut him off, “before I had a chance to update the simulation with all the new data.”
Harry shook his head. “How could you even make time for all that?”
“I told you, I got onto it late last night — or call it early in the morning, what does it matter?” Tom snapped, his temper growing brittle. “My point is, something’s seriously wrong.” He looked haggard, as if he’d driven himself to untried limits.
“Did you sleep at all?” Harry moved a little closer. Before he could improvise another placating remark, Tom flared up like a torch.
“Look, Harry, you want to go home, right? You’ve wanted that more than anything, ever since we wound up in the Delta Quadrant. All I’m trying to do is get you there in one piece, damnit!”
“Alright, alright...” Harry lifted both hands, palms outward.
The pressure in Tom’s voice, the fevered brightness in his eyes pointed to deeper troubles. But he’d just visibly raised all shields against further questions. There wasn’t time now anyway, not when they had to look into the source and effects of that darn phase variance. As he followed Tom through the holodeck arch, Harry pushed his thoughts back into duty mode.
Within the next half hour, the gilt-edged future turned to black. Seventeen seconds into slipstream flight, the problems set in. Problems that couldn’t have emerged during the brief trial run. Time and again, the simulation flung them headlong into disaster. The quantum field collapsed, inertial dampers went offline, hull breach was imminent. Sweat made a cold rivulet down Harry’s spine as he pulled one trick after another. Tom went along with all his suggestions, his efforts to compensate for the recurring overload, with his pleas to give it one more try — till they’d reached a devastating score.
“Twenty-three simulations, twenty-three catastrophes,” Tom spelled it out, facing him across Ops station. “This is no sensor glitch. We’ve got to tell them.”
And he was right. Harry leaned against the console at his back. He curled his hands into fists, staring down as he tapped his knuckles together. He couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t. They all wanted this, they’d worked so damn hard for it, there had to be a solution.
Tied up around his own denial, he waited for Tom to terminate the program. But when he glanced up the next time, Tom had propped himself against the handrail, arms spread out, and watched him with a guarded look.
“Listen. I know how much this means to you.” His voice had lost its tight edge, too. He threw out a hand and lowered his glance. “Hell. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Where that fervent apology came from, all of a sudden, Harry couldn’t begin to guess, since it was Tom who’d likely saved them from the worst.
“Still want to give it a try?” Tom asked.
Bewildered, Harry stared at him. Was Tom seriously asking if he’d reconsider? Or was this about something else entirely, something he couldn’t decode while he was struggling in the quicksand of Tom’s slipping, shifting temper?
“We’ve worked for months,” he began, but Tom waved him off at once.
“I know.” A forced grin took hold on his mouth, and he stepped away from the rail. “So, Ensign. How’re you gonna solve this little problem? Think!”
Harry straightened, unsettled by one more mood swing in so many. “What are you doing, Tom?”
“Well, what’s it look like?” Tom’s glance issued a challenge like live sparks, but the snap of irritable energy didn’t last for long. “I’m trying to motivate you to make this work for us.”
With a stiff little nod, Harry stepped down to the conn and focused on the main viewscreen. Frozen to a pale, icy swirl, the slipstream glared back at him. “We’ll need to boost computer capacity...”
“We’ve already hit the limit.” Tom followed him across the holographic bridge at a slower pace.
“If we take a few more backup systems offline and reroute—”
“How long will that take? At a guess?”
“Right.” Harry grimaced. “Too long, given the benamite crystals’ decay rate.”
Still, he could almost feel the deadlock in his head come apart. They’d done this before, played the part of each other’s sounding board, most recently when they’d redesigned the Delta Flyer’s power distribution. Tossing wild options back and forth till they struck true potential between them.
“Back to square one,” Tom suggested, unrelenting. “What’s the basic problem with compensating for the phase variance?”
“Power supply, computation rate,” Harry replied automatically. “No, wait — it’s time.”
“Well, we can’t slow it down.” Tom stood right behind him now, as if physical backup could add to his mental reserves.
“No,” Harry murmured, “can’t do that, we can only go forward...”
“Ahead in time?”
“Exactly!” He spun around to face Tom. “That’s it. We can use the Delta Flyer to chart a path ahead of Voyager, map the variance in the slipstream threshold and send the corrections back.”
“That could actually do the trick...” Tom cocked his head — “lemme think!” — but whatever lightspeed calculations passed behind his frown, a quick grin washed them aside and lit his entire face. For the first time that day. “Well, I always said you were a genius.”
“Not that I remember.” Harry gave a flustered laugh in return. “In fact, I seem to recall that you made a fairly big deal out of your—”
“Oh, shut up!” Tom’s eyes flashed with humor for a moment, a spark that came and went and left his expression strangely bleak. His shoulders settled with a long breath. “Happy now?”
“Yeah, sure.” Harry cleared his throat. All he could see was that Tom wasn’t. His best friend — best friend I ever had, they’d both said that to each other more than once — wasn’t looking towards the future and their homeward flight with anything resembling joy.
“Tom...” Regret seized him with so much abrupt force that Harry almost forgot what he’d meant to say. “If — if you’re worried that you’ll be sent back to prison, there’s no way the captain—”
“What? Hell, no.” Tom gave him a blank look that left Harry all at sea.
“Then what is it?”
“We’ve got to tell them,” Tom repeated, his tone unchanged.
With some reluctance, Harry made himself listen to reason. Not much time left, to discuss their findings with the senior staff, to prepare a flight plan for the Delta Flyer and take helm control through all the necessary counter-checks...
“So what’s an Edsel?” he asked on the way back to the ‘lift.
“Old type of car,” Tom answered predictably. “One that never sold well. The company lost millions.”
“Twentieth-century model?”
Tom raised an eyebrow in mock-surprise. “How did you guess?”
“You know,” Harry said without thinking, “I’m going to miss you a lot.”
No answer, save for a short dip of Tom’s head, but during the awkward pause that followed, the feeling itself set in and took Harry full in the chest. Not for the first time either. As if some aimless remark had to break the lock first, and the reality rushed him like a phaser burst. Back in the Alpha Quadrant, they’d pick up their lives and start over on separate tracks.
Gotta face it when you get there, Harry told himself, not before. He had it all backward yet again.
Outside the turbolift, Tom turned to him with a brusque motion and caught him by his shoulders. Catching him unprepared once more.
“Look, Harry. We’re... we’re past second thoughts now.” Tom’s fingers dug through his jacket, his breath running high. “You can do this. Let’s go find the captain. Alright?”
He let his hands drop again before Harry made his reply. Perhaps they’d brushed the past too closely, the one thing they never mentioned between them. There was no time left for that now.
During their conference in Engineering, Tuvok and Chakotay took the side of caution as soon as the phase variance came up for discussion, while Seven observed with stoic, unreadable concentration. After an initial burst of disbelief, B’Elanna stood briskly at attention. Harry kept his eyes on the reactor core to stop his reasoning from flying out too soon. His pulse rate climbed by the second.
“It would appear we have no choice but to cancel.” Only Tuvok’s phrasing suggested the sting of a disappointment he would never admit.
“Either that, or we can try it Harry’s way,” Tom countered, creating a break for him.
Harry breathed in deep as Tom took up a place at his side, determined to pull him through — and without this show of absolute confidence, perhaps his nerve would’ve failed him after all. When he launched his argument, he could hear how his voice was laced with high tension, but he couldn’t let it stop him, not anymore.
They were talking manageable risks now. B’Elanna virtually leaped with excitement at his solution. Returning to the Alpha Quadrant might not rate as her top priority, but getting the slipstream drive to work, work something as close to a miracle as they’d ever dared, brought a fierce gleam to her eyes. When Harry brought up the narrow time margin his plan left for Voyager’s auto-navigation, the captain turned towards Tom.
“Couple of seconds?” Tom asked back — and Harry expected him to add either ‘sure, no problem’ or even ‘can’t be done’, but he left the question hanging instead.
“We can do this, Captain,” Harry cut in, “put me on that shuttle!”
By the time he ran out of breath, he could see his proposal take hold in her mind. Kathryn Janeway had a reputation for choosing acceptable risks over setbacks in safety.
When she left with a promise to consider his flight plan, Harry swung back towards Tom and balled his hand tight against the surge of energy that swept him head to foot.
“Thanks,” he mouthed, in the grip of a turning point that seized him with its own force — all things coming together at last — and pointed him in a single direction. It wasn’t until later that the look Tom had given him in return really struck home.
No trace of doubt there, no bravado and no sneer in the face of impossible odds either. Only a thoughtful little smile, like a tribute. And a shadowed look in Tom’s eyes that was almost... almost like —
No, stop it, Harry cut off the thought, that’s long gone. Can’t rewind time and pretend.
The future was bound to sweep them apart, no way around it. His heart clenched all the same.
∞ ∞ ∞
PROXIMA COLONY
On the second class-L planet in the Takara sector, Voyager lay buried inside a glacier, enveloped in sheets of ice. Almost too good to be true, had been Harry’s initial thought when he’d confirmed the fact. And then, aghast at his own reaction, he’d acknowledged an increased likelihood that his mind no longer moved within the established parameters of sanity. A minor concern, next to the first overwhelming success.
It had cost them months of carefully channeled communications and, finally, a small fortune in credits to obtain the sensor log that comprised chance readings from the Takara sector, long discarded as a result of ion interference and plain malfunction. Speculation had already hardened into stubborn belief by the time Harry reviewed those readings, pouring over every energy signature that said Voyager, while his heart rate shot off the scales. Fixed coordinates. One impossibility claimed and overcome, ten years later. But then it had been the least insurmountable, out of the three.
Harry dragged his glance away from the main screen. Out on the roof-top terrace, Chakotay stood beside one of the potted succulents, suffering in the heavy atmosphere of the Proxima Colony. Right now, he seemed to do nothing but watch the craft and the energy trails that zipped across the clouded sky.
Why Proxima? he’d asked on arrival. It’s such an overcrowded place. But dense interstellar traffic meant a constant stream of news, and it was always easiest to stay invisible in a crowd. Back on Earth, Harry had found himself brushing elbows with former colleagues, Academy acquaintances, and Starfleet officials too often. On Proxima, he was one more faceless inhabitant, working out of a top-level apartment, secured by the latest surveillance systems.
The screen before him showed a long column of digits, ash-blue on black, the raw bones of a secret he’d unearthed halfway through the eleventh year. Their most volatile, best hope was hidden somewhere among these unrevealing numbers, if only they could single it out. By force of habit, Harry scrolled down the list, then back up again. As if one item should suddenly light up in recognition of his desperate search.
The numbers represented components salvaged from a wrecked Borg cube that Starfleet had retrieved from the Beta Quadrant. Buried deep in ‘Fleet’s internal channels, wrapped up in the tightest safety protocols, the news had never cast so much as a fleeting shadow across the public sphere. Yet one of Harry’s digital probes had brushed reports about this clandestine operation and brought him a chance find glittering with promise. A glimpse of the future that’d carried him through all of three sleepless nights till he’d identified the mission specs.
The level of secrecy pointed to Borg technology beyond anything at ‘Fleet’s disposal. Something more alarming than nanoprobes or transwarp conduits. Something fundamental, like the capacity for temporal incursions.
After two months of digging through interlocked layers of encryption, Harry had pulled up the list that revealed everything and nothing at the same time. A five-figure total of items, ranging from Salvage Component 00001 to 37105, lined up with the Borg’s own index system. Embedded in the code were clearance levels and coordinates that identified the location of each item, but no further data. No metrics, composition details or functions of individual components. To all intents and purposes, the list was impregnable as a black hole.
Harry had worked himself raw over it, skipping most meals and sleep cycles for several weeks, till he’d contacted Chakotay and Tessa with a message of temporary defeat.
A creaking noise made him flinch. With a push to the terrace door, Chakotay stepped back inside. His heavy tread across the polycomposite floor unsettled the buzzing quiet Harry was used to.
“Can I get you something?” he asked again.
Chakotay gave a curt shake of the head. “I don’t understand how you can live like this.”
Perhaps the arrangement of the couch, side-table, replicator, and wall closets reminded him too much of crew quarters aboard Voyager. But functionality and the space taken up by Harry’s computer systems dictated this disposal of furnishings and personal items.
“It’s... pristine,” Chakotay added on a note of disapproval. “As if you’d never really lived here.”
“That’s the whole point.” Harry shrugged. A low-toned bleep brought his eyes back to his console. “Just business mail in Primary...”
“Primary? What’s that?” Chakotay had moved up quickly for a glance at the screen.
While he flicked through the sheaf of electronic notes, Harry explained it to him. His primary unit was a decoy, equipped with lower-grade safeties that invited Starfleet Intelligence to snoop around — though for twelve months running there’d been no indication that they kept monitoring him. Among other things, Primary drowned out the energy signature alongside all activities that Secondary ran meanwhile, literally effacing it from existence.
“Is that really necessary?” Chakotay gestured at the revolving simulation of an ice-world on the main screen of Tertiary.
“All the equipment?”
“That.” He snapped his fingers at the 3D reconstruction of Voyager’s tomb.
“It’s a symbol of hope, Chakotay.” Harry turned to him. Noticed the quick draw of breath that lifted his shoulders.
Chakotay blew it out again instead of venting his objections. “Tessa’s three hours overdue.”
The waiting set him on edge, Harry could see, more than their long years of research had. “Perhaps that’s a good sign,” he offered. “Could mean that Number Five is our lucky number.”
“His name is Luis Alcubierre,” Chakotay returned, “and he’s an addict with a criminal record. Starfleet turned him loose under code 3110. Aggressive behavior.”
“I know,” Harry answered, his gaze captured by the Salvage Component list once more. He’d dug up those facts himself, months ago.
When he’d exhausted all options in the binary and trinary realm, they’d made a joint decision to change tack. There were people involved, Chakotay reasoned, and people talk. Every Starfleet operation relied on noncoms hired for limited periods. Some of them had an axe to grind with their former employers, some were discharged due to substance abuse, mental instability, or misconduct. The most unreliable sources of information, and yet their only toehold. Tracking them down had been every bit as time-consuming as throwing nets into a swamp.
Their time count was approaching twelve years after Voyager by now. Harry scraped his thumbnail along the console’s edge where the casing had long turned dull. Four rounds of careful observation, custom-tailored approach and subtle questioning had failed to provide a key to the cryptic list. Number Five called for a side-trip to Chile, where Tessa had scheduled a meeting with an archaeology project designer to cover her tracks. Secondary showed her signal still stationary. There was nothing they could do at the moment.
Harry pushed from his chair and went to the bathroom to fix himself up with a shot of hydrocortilene. The full lunch he’d programmed after Chakotay’s arrival sat in his stomach like a lump of thermal concrete, and phantom pain from his dental implants was bothering him again. When he returned, Chakotay had pulled up a seat for himself and studied his line-up of screens and displays.
“You’ve got seventeen updates from several hundred searches you’re currently running,” he said, sweeping a hand across the entire phalanx.
“Not me, just my probes.” Harry slid back into his chair for a look at the update log, but nothing conspicuous jumped out at him.
“Must be difficult not to lose track.”
“Easier than keeping track of myself sometimes.” He shouldn’t have let that slip, Chakotay’s sharp glance told him.
Harry swiveled his seat to the side. He envisioned his life in the likeness of an energy signature with clearly defined amplitudes, oscillating around a baseline that signified average. An average life guaranteed no demonstrable effect on the timeline. He made sure to avoid anything that equaled a variance beyond tolerance range. But that, too, had to be monitored, and there were times when he grew... forgetful.
“This,” Chakotay said suddenly, pointing at the simulated ice-world on the smaller screen again, “is not a symbol of hope. It represents tempting fate.”
“Fate,” Harry mouthed the word, a vague notion that made him uneasy. “Are you saying that you subscribe to the concept of predestined timelines?”
“There’s a difference.” Chakotay leaned back and folded his arms. “Calling it fate implies that a higher meaning resides in time. A pattern that shields it against random changes for a purpose, even if it escapes our knowledge. And yet the choices we make are part of it. If you apply that to our plans...”
He paused and Harry sent an unwilling glance at the image of a frozen class-L planet. It shouldn’t equal more than a flaw within time, a terrible flaw. Not fear.
“If Voyager was meant to be destroyed,” Chakotay continued, “we won’t be able to change the course of events. But if not, then we’re serving a purpose that goes beyond our own decisions. We’ll be tempting fate to reveal itself.”
His tone had changed, growing soft and pensive, as if he were reasoning it out to himself. Charting a path of reassurance, Harry supposed, to make peace with his conscience.
“A self-consistent timeline,” he translated. How individual decisions still fit into that concept was hard to see, but he wouldn’t argue with anything Chakotay took comfort from.
In theory, it was equally possible that an incursion into the past would merely fracture continuity or double the timeline, split off a new thread within an infinitely ramified web. Debatable positions, nothing more. But consider them too closely, and you wouldn’t know how to choose. Too long, and you’d despair.
Harry got out of his seat to start the daily diagnostic of his systems’ circuitry and check the current supplies of isolinear chips. It was vital to keep track of things, even on such a small scale. Every kind of order came with an inherent tendency of disintegrating into disorder.
Chakotay watched him with a frown. “Harry. What are you doing?”
“Battling entropy?” He fingered the stack of chips and noticed a fine chill running up his arms. “Some changes aren’t supposed to happen,” he said with some force. “There has to be a single timeline, the right one.” He tapped ambient controls to raise the temperature by three degrees.
“And we’re in the wrong one,” Chakotay returned on a slight questioning note that seemed to add: if you won’t call it fate, how do you know?
Harry chafed his hands together, then clasped his upper arms. Don’t you feel it, every single day?
Secondary cut into his thoughts with a high chime. He rushed back to enlarge the signal on the main screen.
“It’s Tessa,” he told Chakotay. “She’s on her way.”
By the time the lift panel activated and announced a visitor riding up to the apartment, they’d been sitting in high-wired silence for a while. Harry scrubbed the heels of his hands across the edge of his console, back and forth, before he pushed to his feet. Anticipation turned loose inside him, like eddies of random energy that didn’t connect.
A moment later, Tessa strode in, wearing a long, dark cloak and a look of barely checked excitement. “Sorry for the delay! But I think it was worth the wait.”
Traces of a pale makeup showed at her jawline, and the dark paint around her eyes turned them into wide hollows. Chakotay took her cloak, revealing the strangest get-up underneath, all skimpy black leather jangling with metal applications.
“It’s called Borgvogue,” Tessa explained with a grin, when she noticed Harry’s puzzled glance. “Latest craze among certain subcultures on Earth, but it’s spread to the spacelanes recently.” She unhooked a close-fitting cap from a spring clip at her belt. A metallic contraption like a mounted lens, or an eyepiece, dangled from it.
Harry watched with a growing sense of unreality, as if he’d stumbled into a cheap holo that mismatched his expectations at every point. He flicked another glance at the list on the screen.
“Borgesque ladies are in high demand,” Tessa said, “and we discovered a while back that Luis has a thing for them.”
“She was posing as a hooker,” Chakotay clarified.
“One playing hard to get.” Tessa pulled a face, the spark of amusement in her eyes almost drowning in those wide, dark sockets. “And it paid off. Now watch this while I get changed.” She set the pseudo-eyepiece down on the console and popped a cap to expose the hookup. “Great place to hide a miniature imager. You’ll want to skip ahead to timecode twenty-three-eleven...”
“Right.” The tubular imager almost slipped from Harry’s grip. They were both watching him as he plugged it in, grabbing on to his chair while his free hand skidded across the controls. A brief discharge of light and color filled the screen before it solidified into a half-lit visual.
“There you go.” Tessa stepped back and tugged at her outfit. From the bathroom door, she added, “Oh, and I fixed Luis up with a good dose of tetrovaline before I left. He won’t remember a thing.”
Harry settled into his chair without taking his eyes off the image on the screen. It showed a booth inside a seedy dive. And a man across the table, whose general appearance fit the establishment. Dissolute, his expression frozen in a dull half-grin.
“Amazing stuff, Borg technology,” he said when Harry started the recording. His speech was slurred, dragging on the vowels. “They can do things... gives you the creeps.”
“Oh yeah?” Tessa’s voice was different, almost beyond recognition. Low, provocative, insolent. “So you got yourself kicked out because ‘Fleet figured you ain’t roughneck enough for the job?”
“It’s creeping ‘Fleet out as well, lemme tell you!” the man bristled. “There was talk...”
“There’s always talk,” Tessa said, sounding bored and aloof.
“So how about this!” He leaned forward, a smirk spreading slowly on his face. “The Borg’s worked out a way to make phone calls to the past. I’m not kidding. Hello yesterday? You wanna fire those guns point-five seconds earlier and — bam! Stuff scares ‘Fleet shitless. Now what d’ya say?”
Tessa gave a throaty laugh. “My best guess? You got soused on duty, sailor.”
“You think they’d pass me through security with a buzz on?” The man shook his head. “Nah, I heard them alright, all by my sober self. Time transmitter thingamajig. But it’s all under wraps now, natch. So, shhh.” He grinned widely, and something flashed from his eye-tooth.
Harry paused the recording in time with that tiny lightning gleam and rewound to twenty-three-eleven. His hands shook. He played it again.
Phone calls to the past. Time transmitter.
“Oh god, oh god...”
He didn’t recognize the raw, burned voice that kept saying these words.
“Does that tally with anything on your list?” Chakotay asked at his shoulder. “Talk to me, Harry!”
It was one of the few times that he nearly ran out of patience.
Harry watched his fingers move across the controls, tapping out a command that placed the Salvage Component list next to the vid on the screen. Realities intersecting at impossible angles.
For a moment he felt as if he was staring back over his shoulder, into a shifting web of possibilities, and within that vast, constantly changing grid, Harry Kim was the mere speck of an insect, trapped where two threads crossed, barely holding them together, holding on to himself. Each of these threads stretched for infinity, to far distant points that secured memories like dwindling blips on a star chart.
“Harry,” Chakotay said again.
“Yes. God, yes.” He closed his eyes, but the light-pricks were still there, tracing out a neural overload. He took a breath and another, till he could focus again. “They’ve listed every item with current coordinates...” The codes flashed up, outlined in caustic yellow. “So from this... we’ll be able to tell where the transmitter is.”
“How do we identify the right item?”
“Classification level. The transmitter’s bound to rate top clearance. Can’t be that many...”
There were five in total, he established within moments. But there was only one —
“Here.” Harry brought up the coordinates for Salvage Component three-six-six-nine-eight and slumped back in his seat.
“What does that mean?” Chakotay snapped, his glance darting from the screen back to Harry.
“Just one that registers in the Department of Temporal Investigations.” Energy burst through him, up from his stomach and into his head. “That’s it. Number Five had it right.”
“That means Earth? Their Headquarters?” Chakotay took his affirmative with a look of disbelief. “That’s... almost too convenient,” he said, his voice ground down to a startled murmur. “The Delta Flyer’s still at McKinley Station. Isn’t it?”
They’d decided long ago that they needed to reappropriate the Delta Flyer when they were ready. The open market supplied no craft with comparable capacities, and even if they could build one, piecemeal over the years, acquiring the components would leave too many tracks in the records somewhere. Better to focus the risk instead of scattering it into countless traceable particles.
“’Fleet can’t decide what to do with our Flyer,” Harry answered, recalling the flight controls with their quirky knobs and levers. “It’s unique.” Those controls were straight out of Captain Proton, and Tuvok had called them —
Harry drew his arms in tight over his stomach. Things were moving so fast, as if time had lurched forward. “We’re that close.”
“We still have to figure out ways of breaking into T.I. Headquarters and McKinley.” Chakotay paused. “What about the phase corrections? Any estimate when you’ll have them ready?”
Harry sucked in a hard breath and didn’t look at him. “I’ve completed a basic set that looks workable. But there are some variables involved...” He gestured vaguely. “Fluctuations. I can’t nail the reasons. Not yet.”
A faint noise from the bathroom — either the hiss of the sonic shower or the waterspout — drew his glance across. “Maybe we should think about introducing Tessa to the Delta Flyer’s systems.”
“That can wait,” Chakotay said tersely. “She’s already absorbing all she can find out about Voyager.”
As if she’d heard them, the bathroom door opened a moment later. Tessa strode out in her usual, practical clothes, the color scrubbed off her face. “Well?” she asked, looking back and forth between them, and her expectant smile swept every hint of the dressed-up stranger aside. “What?”
They got up out of their seats in one move, tugged towards a moment that turned the tide in their favor. A moment that had to be marked and met.
Chakotay ran a hand across his hair and gave a brief, shaky laugh. “It seems we’ve located the missing centerpiece.”
“Salvage Component three-six-six-nine-eight,” Harry added. “A temporal transmitter.”
Tessa whooped and threw her arms around Chakotay, who still looked bewildered more than anything, then she turned to Harry.
He wasn’t prepared for this. Whenever he went to visit his parents, he reserved time to play out the motions in his head beforehand. The required smiles and reassurances, the gestures they’d expect, the amount of physical closeness that eased their worries somewhat. It was a painstaking process, and since he’d relocated to Proxima he’d pared his visits down to once a year. In reality, he couldn’t come home. But it would hurt his family too much to realize that, so he made what efforts he could. The visits took a lot out of him each time.
“This is it, this is it!” Tessa gushed, catching him in a bear hug, and for a split second he tensed up, ready to push her away with blind force. She could feel it, of course, and was already drawing back.
Harry shook his head and wrapped his arms around her in turn, like stiff appendages that had been long out of use. No impact on the timeline, he thought, what the hell, and gave himself over to human warmth, just this once. How hard could it be?
As it wound through him, it pulled at his guts, his heart, his throat. Reaching and grabbing, it became real. His stomach heaved. Harry stepped back with a smile that felt like a grimace. “Excuse me for a moment.”
Keeping his pace as steady as he could, he took himself to the bathroom where he dashed cold water into his face and reached for the hydrocortilene before checking himself in the mirror. Despite the paler skin-tone, the smudges under his eyes, some grey in his hair, his looks hadn’t changed all that much in twelve years.
“I don’t live here,” Harry told his reflection. “Never did.”
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. CHALLENGER: STARDATE 71144.2
People traveled back in time to secure the present, not to erase it. Much less erase themselves.
Geordi La Forge paced in his ready room and wished he could at least do it in Engineering. Better still, get his hands on a concrete malfunction that wanted fixing. He’d always avoided thinking through temporal paradox, unless it demanded a rough and ready solution. Now he knew why. Competing sets of theories straddled a wide range of aberrant phenomena Starfleet explorers had encountered in the course of two centuries. The list of temporal anomalies — including quantum fissures, inversion folds, spatial interphases, causality loops, and a whole lot more — was virtually endless. The list of highbrow efforts to explain them was even longer. But all those experts had reached a general agreement that temporal paradox was bound to damage continuity. That even minor incursions could cause vast, fracturing ripple effects.
La Forge threw a moody glance at his overcrowded library interface. What is time? all the theories asked. For himself, he’d always kept the matter within the twin spheres of his personal knowledge. The technical challenges an engineer was bound to confront, and the purely human experience. Time itself might be a complex, multidimensional web, but the sentient mind invariably conceived it as a linear flow.
Perhaps that was why the Temporal Prime Directive promoted linearity as well. It served a single pupose: protect the future of the Federation. It left room for a little variance on the side, within areas that weren’t considered relevant to the greater whole, but the general credo upheld one major timeline that must not be polluted.
We’re designed that way, La Forge told himself. Linear beings with a definite end. Limited creatures. A widespread rebellion against that basic principle was bound to damage the spacetime continuum beyond repair.
But accept linearity as the primary mode of sentient life, and you had to accept death too. Or make time your personal enemy.
La Forge leaned against the desk when his mind took an abrupt dive into the past. Homed in on his worst loss, eleven years ago. He’d even helped Data to transport to the Scimitar, suicide mission that it was, still hoping they could beat those overpowering odds. Betting on blind luck, perhaps. And when Data was gone, blowing himself and the enemy ship into scorching fireworks that reverted to space dust, it had taken him days, weeks, to assimilate the facts. Even now, whenever he brushed the memory, the scalding disbelief was still vivid, embedded within old grief. But he’d never once toyed with the notion of turning back time.
Why not? La Forge couldn’t help wondering now. And if it had been the entire Enterprise crew, and him the only survivor, would it have made any difference? Why should a higher death toll matter more than the shock of every single loss?
He turned back to his viewscreen and paged through the confidential files Command had placed at his disposal, until he’d located the Delta Flyer’s audio log. Perhaps listening to the final communications between Voyager and the shuttle could provide additional insight. Clarify how Kim and Chakotay could deny the claim of linearity over human existence.
He had to play the recording twice to put names to the different voices. Captain Janeway was easily recognizable, and so was the strange, low pitch of a former Borg drone called Seven of Nine.
“I’m detecting a phase variance,” she announced. “Point one, point two.”
“Helm?” Janeway asked tersely.
“I’m still waiting for Harry,” the conn officer — Paris — replied.
While Seven kept up the count of increasing instability, Janeway hailed the Delta Flyer, and Kim responded with, “I can do this. I’m compensating for the spatial gradients...”
A young, confident voice. Nothing at all like the strained, soft monotone in the therapist’s vid, nine years later, La Forge noted with a twinge of sympathy.
Soon afterwards, Seven’s voice recommenced the countdown to disaster. And it was all too easy to picture how tension spread around the bridge, everyone buckling down hard at their stations, every mind thrown into overdrive as they struggled for a stopgap, anything...
“Harry, what’s happening?” the captain demanded. “The phase variance is still increasing.” Her tone grew more forceful by the moment, with a sharp edge La Forge recognized. Like his own captain, Janeway refused to bend before staggering odds.
“I need an answer, Harry. We’re running out of time.”
“Let me try recalibrating the sensors.” Kim’s voice betrayed all the pressure bearing down on him. “I might be overcompensating for the variance—”
Right at this point they’d lost the comm link with Voyager. And within the next few seconds, they’d lost... everything. La Forge curled his fingers and noticed they’d grown cold. Only two voices were left now, Kim and Chakotay, unwilling survivors caught in the slipstream that dragged them away from their ship.
“Alter our slipstream course. We’ve got to go back!” Kim’s tone was laced with panic that burst into anguish when Chakotay refused his appeal. “What are you saying? We’ve got to find them!”
Chakotay’s reply was brusque and to the point. “Ensign, there’s no choice.”
No choice at all. A long silence followed, filled up with imagined terrors. The larger ship spinning out of control as systems collapsed, explosions all over the bridge, the crew’s desperate fight, split-second action and inevitable failure, then a hard ride down into oblivion. A rift that opened in the middle of reality, swallowing life, home, every hope there had been.
La Forge unclenched his hands and loosened his shoulders with a deep-drawn breath. The silence inside the Delta Flyer was made of cold despair, and it surrounded him still, riding a chill down his back.
Data saved us all, Geordi thought. He made a conscious choice.
Choice and sacrifice buffered loss with meaning. He’d never considered alternatives, not even inside some desolate private fantasy, because he’d respected his friend’s decision. But the two men aboard the Delta Flyer had had their own choices turned against them, when acceptable risks conspired to breed their worst nightmare. One hundred and fifty dead, due to a minor error. No choice, no meaning, only the brutal interplay of random negativity.
Could I live with that? La Forge asked himself. And if the answer was no, that left only two options. Erase your own life, or erase the passage of time.
La Forge closed the file and swiveled his chair towards the viewport. A spray of distant stars pricked the eternal dark. He’d put himself through this to understand where Command’s most wanted were coming from. Now he could.
Good luck, he thought, with a nod for the two men he might yet blast to hell.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52142.9
The night before the scheduled slipstream launch, Harry was too keyed up to sleep. Calculations spun through his head as if he’d been fitted with a neural interface that hooked him up to the navigational array. He’d already reviewed his flight plan half a dozen times, even after the captain had approved it.
It was only when he picked up his replicated clarinet that another kind of excitement surfaced. He might hold the original in his hands again soon. Back on Earth, back home. And it pulled on him now, like a gravity well shaped from memories that he’d carefully nursed and maintained, these past four years.
Yet home had acquired a different meaning in the Delta Quadrant. It meant anchorage, like a dwindling point at infinite regress. Holding steady because it was so far out of reach.
Harry ran his fingers over the clarinet’s keys, settling them into familiar positions. There’d been nights when he jolted awake to small sounds and sensations that made no sense at first, not till his mind pieced them together, scrap by scrap, across a distance of lightyears. Nights when he found himself at odds with his own skin and breath, when the strangeness of it all closed around him and slipped through his mind like the sweetest dream.
It’s alright, it’s alright, he’d tell himself, till his heart stopped hammering in his throat. I can still come home. And I will, one day. But during those moments he could feel, just as sharply, that opposite poles anchored the thready balance he kept. Stretching him out over an infinite distance. A desire to slide back into his moorings, and another... to break free.
The clarinet had grown warm in his grip. He began to play, letting the first tune that sprang to mind guide his fingers.
It turned out to be the opening piece of Schumann’s Opus 73. A searching tune that wound up and down till it reached the most piercing high notes and let them drift off into wistful quiet. Three Fantasy Pieces, the composer had finally named his work, but the original title, Night Pieces, seemed to fit the music far more. Harry broke off abruptly, set his clarinet aside, and tried to rub a sudden tremor out of his hands.
He remembered telling Libby, once I’ve made up my mind about something, I can’t let it go. Capturing himself in a nutshell. He’d found himself back home, and all he’d wanted was to return to Voyager. And now he was caught again in that tight spot between times, between one desire and another. Harry sagged back on his couch. He could only touch it here, all by himself, with the privacy lock engaged.
Can’t let go. One churning regret, a single name. Tom.
A hand that covered his own — he could feel it now — a slight, circling motion of the thumb against the inside of his wrist that sent a shiver up the length of his arm. Too soon. Too fast.
Harry closed his eyes as he waded out into recollection.
A couple of months into their journey, Tom had made a pass at him. Not so much a pass as an insinuation: it had been fairly subtle for someone known to broadcast his charms on all frequencies, so subtle, in fact, that Harry had almost missed it. With a long glance, a casual touch, and a few words, innocent in themselves, Tom had suggested that they might take their friendship in a new direction. Add a new shade to it, maybe. Yet Harry, once he’d caught on to what Tom was proposing and overcome startlement, had not been ready for it. Even though he was already in the process of releasing Libby from the focus of his hopes and dreams. Reacquainting himself with reality on a profoundly changed basis.
But Tom — Tom’s friendship — was a vital factor in the process, exactly because Tom continued to provoke, unsettle and exasperate him, daring him to find his footing in the Delta Quadrant. It was a delicate balance, and anything closer, anything physical and completely unfamiliar, might tip the scales.
Besides, Harry knew he’d want more. Not because of any closely held conviction, not because he was actually in love yet, just because it was his way through life: attaching himself with heart and soul. So he’d said exactly what he felt: I can’t, I’m not ready for something like that.
At the time, he’d thought that left no opening whatsoever, though later he wasn’t so sure. Tom had taken it at face value, with a quiet acceptance that surprised Harry. And their friendship moved along afterwards as if that breath-stopping pause had never been. It stayed in his mind though, like an unseen object in a river, creating eddies with its own tenacious force.
At odd moments, he caught himself wondering if the door was still open, or if Tom had long forgotten about it, because he’d probably just acted on the mood of a moment.
Later, Harry poked at the memory with delicate long range probes, wondering if he’d jumped to conclusions about Tom’s motives. Tom was never subtle when he wanted something. That he had been on this one occasion might mean he’d hedged his bets, because more than he’d let on was riding on his offer. Then again, it could mean nothing but that he’d chosen his approach in accordance with Harry’s lack of experience. Outright seduction would have sent him running, no question about it.
Still later... well, he’d reached the point where it was too late. Too many times, he’d caught his heart skipping a beat in Tom’s presence, his breath stopped by a disarming smile — the real smile, private and vulnerable, that Tom mostly reserved for him. And on too many occasions, he’d almost lost Tom to one of the dangers riddling their journey. There’d been Akritiri, nearly breaking his heart. So Harry reached the point, at last, when he admitted the feeling to himself. Prodding it, studying it, exploring its range and limits.
None of that answered the question where to go with it, though. Keep it to himself, treasured and unrequited. Or drop it in Tom’s lap and find out if that window of possibility could be reopened. I’m ready now.
But he’d danced around that issue a little too long. Long enough for Tom to fall in love with B’Elanna. Which didn’t answer any questions but effectively cut them off.
The flare of mixed feelings that assailed Harry as a result ran its course within a couple of days. He was too fond of B’Elanna, for one thing. For another, he couldn’t resent the look of hope in Tom’s eyes. But this turn of events burned away all the second-guessing, all the half-hearted brooding that’d slowed him down. The simple truth was, he couldn’t help loving Tom and had better learn to live with regret.
He probably wasn’t the only one either. Many among the crew — mostly the female crew — found Tom handsome, witty, perhaps a little too full of himself but nearly irresistible in a playful mood. As he listened to the gossip, Harry realized he’d fallen in love with the things about Tom that puzzled or annoyed most everyone else. Things like Captain Proton, like Tom’s passion for speed, his bad jokes. His black moods when he was hell-bent on questioning himself, for no apparent reason. Or the look of awkward delight flushing his face when he showed Harry his replicated copies of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Moby Dick. Too many things.
Harry sat forward, lacing his fingers. The fast rewind had left him giddy and breathless, and the subliminal ache he’d lived with for — oh, about twenty-three months? — had grown acute, a sharp twist under his breastbone. The future, driving into him with careless force.
No place for me, he couldn’t help thinking, not anymore.
Because, once they’d returned to Earth, everything would change. They’d been thrown together for a time, and Tom, who’d started out from a point somewhere below zero, battered and bruised, was bound to reclaim what life owed him. A blazing career, reconciliation with his father, with Starfleet. Harry was prepared, more or less, to watch from the sidelines when it happened. He could almost see it, the future lighting up, the happiness that Tom had always refused to count on enfolding him like a transporter beam. Gone in a rush of glitters.
Harry’s chest tightened unaccountably. There’d been too many moments, still, when being with Tom had felt like a promise. Like coming home to himself. It took nothing but a casual touch sometimes, a quick burst of laughter on a bleak, dragging day, or a glance that captured him defenseless. And then the need to reach out strained him almost beyond endurance. All he could do was keep the wanting locked away, out of sight. One more dangling thread, to be left behind in the Delta Quadrant.
He pushed up from the couch and paced across his quarters. Just once, he couldn’t help thinking, if only I could —
When he touched the viewport with his fingertips, pressed his palm flat against it, he imagined the cold breathing through layers of transparisteel, the chill of deep space and distant stars that you never really felt, and drew it up inside him, up along his arm and into his chest. Imagination was the next best thing after all.
Mere moments later, his combadge buzzed, the faint vibration against his chest all but jolting him.
“Paris to Kim.”
What are you, a mind-reader? Harry let his breath go first, slow and tight through his teeth. “Kim here.”
“You’re not asleep,” Tom noted. “What’s wrong, Harry? Case of the jitters?”
“Bad case of memories and regrets.” His tone betrayed too much, even more than his answer had, but he couldn’t help it. And perhaps it didn’t matter. Tomorrow would see them back in the Alpha Quadrant, at the starting point of separate ways.
“Anything I can do?”
Just once... Harry thought, his eyes closing again to protect an illicit wish.
“Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it. But no.” Despite his best efforts, his voice wavered.
“Sure you don’t want me to drop by?” Tom persisted.
Wasn’t he spending the last night aboard with B’Elanna? Then again, she’d be down in Engineering making last-minute adjustments, exhorting her crew alongside the gel packs. And they had a whole life ahead of them, presumably, as a couple.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Harry answered with minimal delay. And he was. If Tom came to see him now, each and every floodgate was bound to burst wide open. “Good night.”
A small noise filtered over the comm, as if Tom had cleared his throat. “Gonna miss you too,” he said. “G’nite.”
The note of regret in Tom’s voice would have been hard to miss. But it could mean too many things at once, or nothing much. Perhaps he’d hoped for a sentimental perusal of their shared adventures before they became public property, or a last game of pool, for old times’ sake. Perhaps Tom was simply at loose ends, with no preparations left to make, and too unstrung to sleep.
I did the right thing, Harry assured himself repeatedly. There’d been no choice, really.
∞ ∞ ∞
FEDERATION COLONY MENZARA III
Memory was a killing force. But Tessa, Harry told himself as he stalked on ahead, couldn’t know that. He’d simply pretend he hadn’t heard her question, keep his eyes out for the hydroponic injectors instead.
After the morning rain, they’d set out to locate an erratic malfunction in the array of injector units. A flush of damp scents filled the air, so ripe with living things, you could barely breathe. Harry pointed the micro-resonator at a unit half-hidden in the reeds and said, “here.”
Without a glance back over his shoulder, he hunkered down and went to work. Tessa joined him in another moment. He could see her boots at the corner of his eye, wet leather glistening in the dull daylight as she shifted her weight.
“It’s only that I never realized before,” she said awkwardly, expanding on her question that had gone unanswered. “The Doctor’s mobile emitter was an invention from the future, an anachronism.” She’d spent months engrossed in the history of Voyager’s travels, and the intersections between technology and individual growth seemed to capture her interest the most.
“The emitter’s a self-contained projector capable of generating both the photons and the necessary force fields,” Harry told her as he unscrewed a dirt-encrusted cover plate. “Power source... as yet unknown.”
“It gave the Doctor access to a whole new range of experience and let him evolve beyond his original design,” Tessa returned. “Don’t you think it had a large impact on his self-perception, the decisions he felt qualified to make?”
Harry bit his teeth together and brushed some damp strands out of his eyes. It should be easier to talk about the EMH, because, in a manner of speaking, he was still alive. Just... dormant.
But it wasn’t. He’d had no chance to prepare for this particular question, and he knew all too well how a misplaced puncture into memory’s circuits could set off a chain reaction.
“Gotta replace this patch of wiring,” he said tightly. “It’s the loose contact just below the switch that’s been causing the shutdown. Hand me the toolkit, okay?”
“I can do it, if you like.” Tessa leaned down to peer at the injector’s corroded innards.
“’S alright, I’ll have it fixed in a few.”
She handed him a reel of insulated wire, blew out a long breath, and said “Harry...”
There was a note of apology to her tone, mixed with frustration. And curiosity, perhaps.
Harry shook his head and pulled out the brittle old wiring. He’d become an expert at highly selective recollection. Disconnecting and disabling memory was a necessity, a matter of survival. And if they were going to save Voyager, then — deserving or not — he had to survive.
During his time aboard the Explorer, he’d still struggled with bursts of memory at every turn. And for the first two years, all he’d managed to accomplish was to keep them shut away from daylight, unrevealed by his expression, his voice, or his body language. Later, he’d experimented with various techniques. Rupture reminiscence in the bud and jump to a different line of thought. Overlay the random associations surrounding each name, each life, with different connections. Channel the hard chill of adrenaline into another activity, something recognizably useful. All this, and he still had to talk about Voyager and her crew from time to time.
It was a long, harrowing process of trial and error, and at first he’d only succeeded at forcing recollection from his waking mind, down under the surface and into his dreams. When he finally stopped dreaming, memory found fewer outlets during unguarded moments. Bad lapses that made his head swim, his stomach heave, and his heart thud violently. But those physical responses threw him a lifeline too. The more intense they got, the more they eclipsed the memories themselves. Fourteen years after Voyager, he still felt the symptoms of recollection, but not their actual shape or meaning.
Harry wiped his palm off on his jacket and straightened. “Should be working fine now.”
“Thanks.” But instead of turning aside, Tessa watched him quietly. When her narrow, angular features set in calm resolve like this, there was something almost... vulcan about her.
“Look.” Harry pushed his hair out of his face again. “Why don’t you ask Chakotay.”
“I do, all the time.” Tessa gave a brief, conciliatory smile. “But you look at these things from a different perspective.”
Harry bent to snap the toolkit shut and slung the strap over his shoulder. “I really don’t think so.”
Now that their preparations increasingly forced them to discuss events aboard Voyager, he listened to his own accounts as if they came from another timeline. Carved into ancient stone, dry and unchanging, yet unrelated to his mental processes in the present. All he needed in the present was the debt that made him what he was, and the will to act on it.
He started to walk along the footpath, back towards the garden. Up ahead, the residence windows peeked through the greenery, like hooded eyes. Water dripped down from the trees and ran a chill along his scalp. This late in the year, temperatures dropped sharply overnight, and rain fell in thick curtains, only to be steamed into dragging mists towards midday.
“I’m sorry,” Tessa offered as she caught up with him. “I didn’t realize. Where you draw the line.”
Personal things, Harry might have answered, but that, too, was a matter of definition. He shrugged. “No harm done.”
Chakotay was at work in the garden, he saw, when they stepped into the open. Trimming dead branches off a jezapple tree, as if its continued growth truly mattered.
Harry slowed his step. All this — the farm, the quiet life timed to unchanging cycles — would soon cease to exist. All the things that weren’t real.
“So what’s next?” he asked Tessa. She’d mentioned some other malfunction that he couldn’t quite recall. It was pointless anyway, pointless maintenance of a reality they’d abandon within months, if things went according to plan. Perhaps she could hear that in his tone. His impatience.
“We run a diagnostic of the injector array,” she answered drily. “After that, lunch.”
As Chakotay watched them approach, his glance hardened. Reading the mood, Harry supposed, the residual tension. He’d always been good at that.
“Problems?” he directed the question at Tessa.
She gave him a steady smile. “Nothing Harry couldn’t fix.”
Rainfalls set in early that day, midway through a drab afternoon, and forced Chakotay back indoors. Footsteps, a rustle of clothing, the rattle of keys on wood. Harry shifted his shoulders, eyes fixed to his calculations on the screen. Those small noises prickled along the back of his head, scraping at his thready focus. He narrowed his eyes at the mutable diagram that represented slipstream kinetics, checked the parameters of velocity distribution one more time. Nothing wrong there, no glitch at all that he could see.
But when he switched back to the master screen, the problem glared at him. A volatile factor in the progression of the phase variance. Each time he ran a new simulation, the prognosticated variance started to fluctuate somewhere down the line. Always in a different place.
Harry leaned back and folded his arms, mostly to stop himself from lashing out at the controls, worn shiny in places after long use. He’d brought a portable unit with him this time that he’d hooked up with Chakotay’s system, after installing all the necessary shielding routines. It should be a matter of days, he’d thought, to pinpoint that recurrent flaw.
Hard rain pelted the windows and the patio doors, drew chaotic glistening patterns as rivulets joined, crossed, disengaged. Harry picked at a loose thread in his sweater’s sleeve, winding it round his finger, and caught himself thinking up a formula for the random distribution of water on glass. Damn. He trained his attention back on the screen.
Hyperdimensional progression looked flawless overall, the problem arose in the formation of the slipstream threshold itself. Somewhere along the seam between opposing layers of expanding and contracting spacetime. They’d never noticed that, during the testing phase aboard Voyager. But they’d only spent months, not years, on these calculations.
He’d given it nine years, so far. His revised phase corrections were solid for the most part, but still offered no guarantees. Nothing like the failsafe, shockproof certainty that he needed.
Harry got up again, pacing the floor, picked up things and set them down again. His hands were shaking, he noticed with annoyance. A blood-crusted slash that he didn’t recall traversed the heel of his hand. He felt fairly certain that he’d used nothing with enough of an edge to cut skin, when he’d repaired the hydroponic injector.
Three steps took him to the replicator, where he got himself a glass of water and gulped it down before he resumed work. The rain had lessened somewhat, but a drizzle had crept into his mind, like static, frazzling the edge of every thought. He leaned closer to the screen.
A short while later, Chakotay returned to the living area and bustled about. Harry started to mouth the progression index to shut out the grating noises. Deflector geometry remodulated in a fluid dance that focused the quantum field. Until those vexing fluctuations set in again. Corrections stumbled up, to close the gaps that emerged in quickened succession. Always a little too late.
“It’s time,” Harry muttered, chafing his thumbs against the edge of the console. “I need more time.”
“Problems?” Chakotay asked, for the second time that day. Too close of a sudden.
Harry sat up with a start and blinked. The rain had stopped meanwhile. Diffuse silver daylight spilled through the windows, refracted by raindrops in a riddling pattern. He swung his chair around slowly, away from the calculations that defeated him time and again.
“We’ve located Voyager. Our plans to acquire the transmitter and the Delta Flyer are shaping up.” He jerked a thumb at the screen. “And I still can’t get this to work.”
“Maybe you should take a break,” Chakotay said calmly. “You’ve been at it for hours. Just like yesterday.”
And tomorrow, and the day after. Harry let his glance trail past him.
Everything in the room, from the mellow lighting in the alcove to a pile of books on the coffee table, spelled homely comforts. Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata No. 1 was running in the background, a piece that he’d known by heart when he still played. All these years later, his fingers still twitched in unconscious imitation.
He pushed out of his chair, like a broken coil tossed up by failure. The buzzing static that spread from the back of his head drowned out the music. Small mercies, Harry thought. Smaller by the day.
Chakotay propped his hip on an old-fashioned wooden bureau. “So tell me what’s wrong.”
“This is wrong, all of it.” Harry flung his hands out, indicating the room and the patchwork of wet silver-green beyond the windows. “None of this should exist, it’s all a mistake I made.”
He could hear the pressure in his voice, could feel it rise in waves through his backbone. Most times he drew on differential geometry to break its momentum. No chance of that now.
Chakotay’s glance tracked to the side. “It wasn’t just your mistake.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No.” Chakotay set his shoulders and met his eyes squarely. “If you must know, I was opposed to your plan, I thought the risk was too great. Too many variables. But I never even tried to talk Kathryn out of it.”
Harry shrugged. “You couldn’t have.”
Something flashed in Chakotay’s eyes as he stepped away from the bureau. Something charged and heavy, like regret. And he moved in too close again.
“Can’t you give yourself a break, just once?” It wasn’t sympathy that thickened his voice now, he made it sound more like a warning. “All that guilt, Harry. It’s crushing you.”
“It is me, Chakotay,” he said abrasively. “There’d be nothing left without it.”
A rushed heartbeat climbed into his throat, filled the gap where the music had been, filled his ears. He turned aside, to the patio doors, and tapped out the rhythm on the glass. Quick and unsteady as rain. But Chakotay was right behind him.
“You’re not listening,” he said, his tone strident with purpose. “I’m trying to keep you going. Or at least motivate you to try.”
You? Harry swung about, ready to pick a fight, if that was what he wanted. You, Chakotay?
“You want motivation?” His face felt suddenly tight, as if every muscle was cramping up. “I killed them all. One hundred and fifty crew.”
“Yes.” Chakotay took another step forward, and his jaw firmed. Patience grown hard and unforgiving. “You keep saying that, and you recite that number as if it’s a mountain range bearing down on you. But that isn’t quite true, is it?”
He pushed the question into Harry’s face, backing him against the patio door.
At close quarters, Harry lost the thread of his accusation. At least it’d seemed like one. “What do you mean?”
“That not all these people meant the same to you,” Chakotay returned. “That you’re hurting worse over some losses than others, even though your conscience tells you that each life should weigh exactly the same — is that not correct?”
The music had run out into silence. With a curt nod, Harry clamped down on due protest. His stomach gave a twinge that burned up along his gullet. He pressed his shoulders and his spine into the cool glass for relief.
“Chakotay,” Tessa’s voice cut across the room.
When Chakotay turned towards her, some of the tension faded from his stance. “It’s alright, this is between Harry and me.”
She paused in the open doorway, her glance shifting back and forth, undecided. But Harry agreed that they should keep her out of this, so he said nothing and used the moment instead to slip aside. Gaining space and breath to raise his defenses. A moment later, Tessa’s footsteps receded down the hall.
He pulled himself upright to face Chakotay again. Perhaps this had been a long time coming, an hour of reckoning that was part of his debt.
“You’re not letting anyone touch the hurt,” Chakotay rounded on him, “maybe not even yourself, by holding out that number like a flare shield, the total of lives that were lost.”
“I’m not touching it?” Harry grated, stunned and furious. “I live inside it, Chakotay, all through these past fourteen years, I’ve lived inside it!”
“True. But you’re also refusing to face it. You’ve made it a blank wall that surrounds you, and nothing will go through. Not from without, not from within.”
“So what, in your expert opinion, should I do?” Harry flung it back with all the sarcasm that’d become second nature to him. “Sample all the finer shades, face the worst, till I break down? Which may put our one chance to save Voyager in jeopardy, by the way.”
“What is the worst, Harry?” Chakotay confronted him with an unrelenting force that he didn’t know how to oppose. “Who would you save, if you could — if you had to choose?”
Harry shook his head in reflex, his face feeling numb. Flare shield, he thought, that’s right. He’d built shields, shutters, airlocks round his memories till they kept him out as well. And that was when he’d decided that the memories were safe.
“I’m not playing your game!” he said through his teeth. When he curled in his fingers, they tingled as if the neural connections had been dormant for a while.
“This isn’t a game,” Chakotay snapped, anger driving through his patience. “It’s an effort to keep you alive, at least long enough to go after Voyager and make good on the only chance we may get.”
His unspoken implication was clear enough, and it startled Harry — not so much that Chakotay knew, but that he’d shrug it off like this. If they failed, Harry wouldn’t survive. One way or another, it was going to kill him and bring deliverance at last.
“Look at me,” he said, “I’m alive enough. I breathe, I eat, I work.”
“And you sleep, occasionally. Or so you lead us to believe.” Acerbic humor lightened Chakotay’s glance for a moment. “But it’s not enough. You’re going to crack under the strain, Harry. You know that as well as I do, the only question is when. It could undermine our efforts in a week or a year from now. At the worst, it could happen when all your attention is needed to save Voyager. I won’t let you do that.”
His voice had grown quiet but all the more cutting for it. Perhaps grief and remorse had unlocked a need for retribution — and who could blame him? Harry fell back a step. His stomach gave a violent heave, a danger sign.
“So you’d prefer a controlled environment, is that it?” He’d tried for detached tones, but it came out sounding sullen and scared. With a shaky breath, Harry went for challenge instead. “Then what? I crack, and you drag me back to my feet? Sure you can do that? If you’re forced to take me to a clinic, we’re busted.”
Chakotay acknowledged that with a sharp nod. “Yes,” he said firmly, “I think I can do it. But there’s more. Don’t forget I’m betting my life on this as well. Everything that I have here. I need to know that it’s worth it, and I need to know the potential hazards. All of them.”
Harry leaned back to level a cool gaze at him. “I’m a walking hazard, Chakotay, all five feet, eight inches of me that you see.”
He could see how it got under the man’s skin. Muscles slanting in his jaw, Chakotay seized his shoulders. Almost ready to beat him. And perhaps that was exactly what he’d wanted to provoke.
“This is no game,” Chakotay repeated and shoved him backwards. “I won’t have you treat it like one. I’m giving my life. You owe me the truth. Got that?”
“Yes,” Harry said hoarsely. No escape. God, he couldn’t escape this. Not and keep working with the man. He would’ve preferred a beating. But Chakotay was going to put him through this, and all he could do was... cooperate.
Chakotay’s hands dropped. “So. Who would you save?”
The floor seemed to roll under his feet, a particle wave that collapsed back into solid matter. He glanced at an empty spot in the distance, fixing his mind somewhere far from thought. “The captain.”
“No.” Chakotay sighed. “That’s a lie. You’ve become an expert at dissembling, I’ll give you that, but not where it counts. Try again, Harry. The truth. You’re not alone.”
Tuvok. B’Elanna. He shook his head blindly. It was already starting, a seismic tremor that rose from the soles of his feet and twisted through his gut. “I can’t.”
I discovered a point-four-two phase variance in the slipstream threshold, memory whispered through his mind — oh and that voice came in like a shockpulse, till he was shaking head to foot — “Please!”
“You have to.” Chakotay stood where his shadow should fall. “I’m here.”
But he’s not — we never — it ripped through his chest with the very same agony that took him when he first realized — “Tom.”
It felt like a scream and came out in a harsh whisper and left him giddy in the middle of a blackness he’d kept at bay fourteen years. He clamped his arms round his middle. “I’d save Tom...”
“Yes.” Chakotay’s subdued tone traveled a measureless distance. “Here, sit down, Harry. I know.”
No, you don’t, you can’t. But he hadn’t the breath left, except for one thing. “I killed him.”
This was when darkness swallowed him whole, wave after wave, and he went under gratefully.
When time forced him to open his eyes again, he lay curled up on Chakotay’s couch, a blanket over him, sweaty clothes stuck to his skin. “Oh god...”
Hoarse, too, his throat hurt. Chakotay sat beside him and reached a hand to his shoulder. Things came back to him then. What he’d said. Falling apart. Retching his heart out. Dry, wracking sobs. Exhaustion. The human equivalent to a core breach, he supposed.
His glance drifted around the room. The light had the look of morning. Tessa perched on the arm of the couch with red-rimmed eyes. When she fixed a look full of anger on Chakotay, Harry thought that she might be angry on his behalf. It didn’t matter. He shifted, so that Chakotay’s hand dropped off his shoulder, and managed to get a word out. “Water.”
Tessa got up and handed him a glass. Waited till he held it steady, more or less. He swallowed with difficulty. His teeth were aching.
“Forgive me,” Chakotay said, as if he meant it. “I thought it was necessary.”
“You knew,” Harry croaked, an accusation. “How did you know?”
“It wasn’t that difficult to guess.” Chakotay’s mouth twisted. “Even aboard Voyager. The way you looked at him, the way he looked at you. But you never—”
There was half a question in that one word, never, and a different type of pain, like a scalpel slicing through the dull agony that ranged from horizon to horizon. Harry closed his eyes.
“No. We never.”
“When he was with B’Elanna—”
“No,” Harry whispered, “before. There was a time. Before. But.” A twitch like a shrug took care of the rest. Missed chances. Regrets worth half a lifetime.
“That’s not what I meant. He wouldn’t have been with B’Elanna if you—”
“Does it matter?” Harry cut in harshly. Another if might just do the trick and take the scalpel to his heart. “I never told him.”
“You’ll get another chance,” Chakotay said calmly. “If we succeed, you’ll see him again. You need to remember him.”
Harry gave a feeble shake of his head. It made no sense. It was a paradox riding on the temporal convolutions to outmatch each and every one of them, so much that it challenged his mind to come out of hiding. “What’s the point?”
“It’s the best thing we’ve got, Harry. Love. It can keep you alive.” Chakotay smiled, or tried to. It looked tight and uncomfortable. “Better than grief,” he said. “Or guilt. You need every bit of strength you can find.”
“Even if there’s more grief... more guilt attached.”
“Even so. There’s hope, too. You haven’t had any.”
He started up on a flare of protest but found that he was too weak to get upright, found that his protest didn’t hold together either. Pain and remorse had pushed him on, not anything remotely akin to hope.
“You must remember him, Harry. Alive.”
Harry closed his eyes again. “Leave me alone.”
For days afterwards, he was wrapped around one single thought that stung and twisted like a toxic creature.
You’ll see him again.
He hated Chakotay for implanting that notion in his mind, with a fierceness he’d only ever aimed at himself. The thought remained, though, and all Harry could do was close himself up around it.
No, I won’t. I’ll exterminate myself so that Ignorant Harry can meet Tom again next morning on the bridge, without the foggiest notion. Fourteen years and counting, fourteen years of hard work, of not recalling, not regretting, not even that. I won’t see him again, not in any conceivable timeline. Never. And Harry won’t know.
Each time he reached the end of that thought, it ripped through him again, bright as a comet’s tail, tracing out memories that he couldn’t touch. Not yet.
For days that stretched into weeks, he couldn’t work. Couldn’t focus for the life of him. Chakotay took it in stride and argued that after all this time, they could wait it out, their results would be the better for it. Tessa programmed the replicator for all kinds of comfort food and didn’t interfere.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52143.5
Powered up, the Delta Flyer hummed with meshed energies. As he rounded the craft, Harry trailed his hand across the parametallic plating, a faint electric buzz running smooth as water over his skin. After a thorough systems check, he’d gone ahead and examined every vent and nozzle manually. Anything to set irrational anxieties at rest. Now he almost wished he’d discovered a minor defect, something to justify his uneasiness and focus his mind. But the Delta Flyer was in perfect shape, ready to ride the rapids in front of Voyager, as he’d put it the evening before. The constant calculations he’d need to run, timing and sequence, the crucial emergence patterns of the slipstream were all fixed in his head.
Please, his fingers spelled out against the hull, oh please.
They were looking at a fairly short ride down the maverick stream. Three minutes, five at most — due to the amount of fluctuating factors, the time span defied precise calculations — and the slipstream drive would hurtle them back to the Alpha Quadrant. Three minutes, or five. Not too much to ask, was it?
Harry pressed his palm against the plating beside the warp field grille, touching throbs of leashed power that vied with his own pulse. And it spread through him in mounting ripples, went to his head until his vision swam. Every contour before him shivered and fanned out into odd, ragged patterns. In a single shockpulse, the ripple went through him, and he swayed, bracing for a fall. His breath ran icy cold. The same distortion effect, he realized, that he’d experienced two days ago, only stronger this time.
When he blinked hard, everything was back to normal. Only a slight, distant hum pattered against his palm. He pulled his hand back and steadied himself. All those weird sensations were gone without a trace. If he went to sickbay now, would the Doctor label it a psychosomatic episode, due to sustained stress, insomnia, and maybe a bad case of repressed fears? There wasn’t time for that anyway, no time for second thoughts either. He had a job to do and only minutes left to retrieve his focus.
On the far side of the shuttlebay, the doors unlocked with a noise like an angry breath.
“Hey, Harry.” Tom crossed the deck in long, nervous strides.
Caught out and still not entirely steady, Harry found himself short of escape routes. He’d taken a spare and very early breakfast before he initialized the Flyer’s systems check — avoiding Tom’s company in the mess hall as a calculated side-effect. They’d have to say goodbye, things like ‘see you on the other side’, and Harry wasn’t sure what that might do to him.
“Say, you weren’t trying to sneak off, were you?” Tom softened the question with a grin as he stopped half a pace away from Harry, but his eyes didn’t light alongside. He was wound up tight round a restless energy, as he’d been so often lately.
Harry offered a smile by ways of apology. “Hardly.” Constant transmissions reported the Delta Flyer’s systems status to the bridge after all. “I was just—”
“Busy,” Tom finished in a dry tone. “Yeah, I can see.”
His glance traveled the Flyer’s length, quick and suddenly bright with appreciation. It didn’t help when that same glance returned to Harry and pinned him in place right there, an awkward complement to the sleek hull that shimmered white like an untouched glacier.
“We’re ready to go,” Harry stated the obvious. “Chakotay was about to complete the preflight cycle last time I looked.” When Tom nodded, Harry noticed a faint flush starting to crawl up his throat, cresting his turtleneck. “Something that worries you?”
That question came out sounding all wrong — he’d aimed for nothing more personal than afterthoughts about the troublesome phase variance — but Tom gave him no chance to clarify.
“No, I’m not worried—” he shrugged, “—we’re taking a risk, but I’ve seen worse odds. I think.” A strange little smile twisted his mouth. Was another ‘but’ taking shape there? Harry wondered, or was it —
“Just here to see you off.” The smile vanished at the rate of a quantum collapse, and Tom’s tone changed, too. “Harry... I was going to.” He braced one hand against the hull and trapped Harry in the shadow of his body heat. Too close in under a second.
“You were... going to... what?” Harry stammered, part of his mind already shutting down.
“Give you some kind of good-luck charm, I guess.” Tom’s mouth twitched again, and for a moment the bright gaze faltered. “Trouble is, I don’t own anything like that. Only the clutter that I pick up on shore leave, and that doesn’t count.”
“No,” Harry murmured. He hadn’t noticed when it happened, but Tom leaned so close now that his breath warmed Harry’s face, and spots of color had risen to his cheeks.
“So. I thought maybe I should give you...” But Tom’s hand was ahead of his explanation, his palm settling lightly against Harry’s jaw, tipping his face up.
This isn’t happening. Harry wasted the fractional second he might have used to react or escape by questioning his own sense of reality, and then it was too late, as he’d probably wanted it to be.
“Piece of me.” So close, brushed against his lips, the words were indistinct and questionable, but the pressure of Tom’s mouth on his own wasn’t, it was light and heat powering up fast enough to be blinding.
Harry closed his eyes in reflex. The effect remained, though, took control of his senses when his lips parted and Tom’s warm breath slipped into his mouth. Lighting him up with a single tremor that ran the length of his spine.
One moment they were poised on the edge of a brittle connection, barely breathing, and the next they were pressed against each other, his own arms around Tom and Tom’s arms locked over his back, and the kiss became real with that. Shifting, clinging, warming him through to the pit of his stomach, kicking his pulse into a wild staccato. Tom held him close, passion wrapped around a core of breathtaking gentleness that turned Harry’s knees to water, because he’d never anticipated this, and he couldn’t not respond, couldn’t let go, even though he knew this wouldn’t outlast the next minute. Tom’s mouth moving against his own, searching him, while Tom’s fingers slid through his hair — all this and a pounding heartbeat laced through his own. Only for another moment and another —
“Gotta go, or I’ll—”
In hindsight, Harry could never decide who of them said that or moved away first. It made no difference either way. Tom stepped back slowly, flashing him that beautiful smile just before he turned away. Eyes clear as summer skies over the Pacific, back on Earth. Harry watched him cross the deck, till the doors closed on a whisper.
Just this once, he echoed his own thoughts from the night before, in a different voice.
His pulse still leaped in his throat. Once, and over, past now. Not that it felt that way.
Under ordinary circumstances, events — including singular events — had a finite existence in time and space, the intervals between them organizing sequences of cause and effect. Harry looked towards the Flyer’s open hatch and raked his hair back with both hands. Only a light-like interval equaled zero, defeating the cause-effect progression.
Harry took a long, uncertain breath as he turned his back on the shuttlebay. Yes, definitely light-like. Enclosed within himself stirred a vibrant thread — more alive than memory — that belonged nowhere, committed as it had been to the gap between their Delta Quadrant past and their Alpha Quadrant future.
And it had been a goodbye kiss, nothing else. B’Elanna wouldn’t grudge them that, Harry thought. A gift, and a keepsake, encapsulating what they’d been to each other for a limited stretch of time.
Something he’d guard against the erosive wash of the future, too, like a retrograde hope.
He closed his heart around it and boarded the Delta Flyer in a thoroughly altered state of mind. Filled with weightless energy, completely focused. They could do this. They could do anything, now.
And when it all went wrong, he felt so deeply betrayed that he knew he’d never recover.
∞ ∞ ∞
FEDERATION COLONY MENZARA III
His dreams were riddled with memories now. Vividly colored, brutally detailed. One night, he went out into the garden and ripped the ground open with his bare hands, like a dog. He pressed his face down into the dirt, smelling earth, tasting it mixed with salt that rushed into his mouth from the back of his throat. It was a ritual of some kind that he didn’t understand, but it made sense to his body, and he fell asleep there, curled up in a shallow grave.
“Harry.” Tessa loomed over him, against a white-washed morning sky. He couldn’t make out the smile that her tone implied. “Breakfast is ready. Are you coming?”
“In a moment.”
She left him to it then, left him to stare up into near-transparent blue and remember, the memory twisting in his gut, energizing him, like a laser scalpel.
Piece of me, whispered a voice out of lost time. Tom’s voice.
Harry trapped the air in his lungs as long as he could. Straining to the point of agony. Fourteen years, and he’d never remembered their parting. Which cast serious doubt on the nature of the memory, too. Perhaps desperate fantasy had taken over, brushing up a far more casual goodbye, or none. Tom, as he’d pointed out himself in the memory or dream, had owned no good-luck charms he could give away. There was no material proof that he’d ever even entered the shuttlebay.
But the question remained. A puncture in the continuum.
It shouldn’t trouble him so much, Harry knew, that he’d never discover the truth. Still, certainty would have been the singular keepsake he cared for. The one thing he should have liked to carry to his own extermination.
He resumed work that day, for a couple of hours. Not on the phase corrections, not yet, just a survey of the floor plans and duty rosters they’d need to break into the headquarters of Temporal Investigations. Surveillance systems were next. He paged through the schematics his sleepless probes had hijacked — not a complete set by far — and began memorizing them.
Easy, he thought with a start. It made him realize how much energy he’d spent on managing himself, within the confines of time, stretched to the limit between complex advance planning and the deadlock of memory. In hindsight, he wondered how he’d even managed to breathe. He’d spent a lot of time just doing that, recently, tramping around the subtropical groves and listening to the rain’s errant music.
When he’d specified new search parameters for his probes, Harry closed the files and tipped his chair back.
Chakotay had picked a fine time, just when they were gearing up for the final stage of their plan, to come down on him like a ton of bricks. But he’d paid for it too, in his own coin. For a week or so, Tessa had barely talked to him, all conversations had been trimmed down to the demands of factual necessity. Once Harry noticed — and that, too, took him a while — he’d approached Tessa. It wasn’t worth her trouble.
He had a right, Tess.
That’s what you think, she’d said, and, just for the record, I disagree. But by his own standards? No.
Yet she’d softened, little by little, after that. Perhaps she’d finally let herself notice what a burdened look Chakotay wore, and how he took himself out of their way as much as he could.
He was still out on the patio, Harry realized, as he listened into the quiet. A deck chair creaked faintly, paper rustled. Chakotay had vacated the living area hours ago, once Harry sat down by the console.
He was reading a book, Harry discovered when he glanced through the half-open door. It slid back with barely a whisper, but Chakotay’s book dropped into his lap at once.
“Finished?” he asked.
“For now.” Harry stepped out and leaned against the nearest wall. The ground between them was still uncertain, and they were both treading it cautiously. He could have started a conversation by asking about Chakotay’s book. Losing more time.
“You know,” he said. “I don’t blame you. I should’ve faced up to it sooner than this. Instead of trying to bury all the memories.”
“It was what you needed to do at the time,” Chakotay answered slowly. “To stay sane.”
Harry folded his arms and wondered if he was receiving eggshell treatment, the sort reserved for reconvalescents and time bombs. “You think I’m sane?”
“Intellectually.” Chakotay raised one eyebrow like a lopsided apology.
“Right. Intellectually sane, spiritually crippled, emotionally dead. That your complete diagnosis, Doc?”
“Not dead, Harry,” Chakotay answered with a breath so deep and harsh, Harry worried for a moment that he might cry. But his expression smoothed out again quickly. “You’ve been alive to pain all these years. Over the past weeks—”
“Waste of my time,” Harry snapped, suddenly impatient.
Chakotay shook his head. Looked him over for a long, unnerving moment, as if holding a thought suspended for revision. “Do you know,” he said finally, “you sound a lot like him. I didn’t realize it at first, but it’s been there ever since our return. His tone. His sarcasm.”
Harry clamped down on a start of anger, as if Chakotay had less of a right to remember and compare.
“Kind of inevitable, don’t you think? My very own Caldik Prime. Only so much worse.”
They were talking about Tom now, he hadn’t started it and wouldn’t be able to stop it either. He turned aside. “I used to think I’d... that I should be more like him.”
Without Tom’s example, he might never have framed such a wild plan in the first place. Would’ve lacked the nerve to carry it out, most likely, though the dogged commitment was all his own. And if Tom had left him a mold for his self-loathing, too, it’d set in so fast that he never noticed.
“This isn’t about me,” he said, terse with annoyance. “About any of the things I might’ve wanted.”
“It’s not?” No hint of provocation to Chakotay’s tone, not this time.
Harry looked out across the garden where incursions of sunlight threw ribbons across the grass. Faint gold that would flame up later, with a fierce crackle of color.
“If I could turn back time, Chakotay.” He shook his head. “I’d want him to have... everything. I’d never change the way things were. He chose B’Elanna, and since that’s who he wanted—”
“Well, there I disagree,” Chakotay said quietly and got up from his chair. It scraped against the patio’s terracotta tiles, and the sound drew Harry’s eyes back to him.
“You see... at one point, while you were all working on the Delta Flyer, I discovered that B’Elanna was injuring herself. She was depressed, she felt nothing.” Chakotay’s features hardened. “Tom had never noticed a thing.”
“I didn’t know.” Harry felt the blood drain from his face. “I never knew.”
“Between B’Elanna, the Doctor and myself, we figured out a way to make her stop.” Chakotay drew up his shoulders. “I didn’t tell her—” He cut himself off with a brief gesture. “Well. Not my idea of a healthy relationship, but that hardly mattered.”
At a loss for answers, Harry studied the tiles before his feet. They’d been handcrafted, each carrying a unique flash mark of incredible heat. His memories of the last weeks aboard Voyager were still an assortment of drifting, ripple-edged fragments. Impossible to tell how accurate they were, or how shadowed by his own desires. Impossible to say, now, if Tom had been happy with B’Elanna.
“I just want you to know,” he started. “Just one thing. I’m not doing this so that I can... For another chance. Even if there was one.”
A fleeting touch to his shoulder made him look up again.
“I know,” Chakotay said drily. “We wouldn’t be here if I’d ever suspected that.”
“Then why.” His voice grew rough with disbelief. Why put me through all this? If you were sure of my motives the whole time.
“I was concerned about your state of mind.”
“That’s one hell of a way to show it.”
“Isn’t it just.” Chakotay’s mouth quirked with a painful sort of self-mockery. “But the more time passed, the more it got to me.” He fell serious again. “The way you never mentioned him, never said his name. Each time we reviewed those flight plans and operation procedures, each time we discussed the bridge crew’s probable actions. Not once in all these years, Harry.”
One step to the side brought him up against the second deck chair, so weather-worn that the wood had lost all color. Harry sat down heavily, dumbfounded that this had never occurred to him before. Not so much that his silence might be revealing, but that it formed his one solid link with the past that he’d clutched to himself, unbroken. He planted his elbows on his knees and looked into the hollow that his hands shaped, cupped around nothing. His breath went out in a sudden burst.
“I... loved him. I don’t think I deserve to even have that kind of feeling anymore.”
But he’d wanted to say it all the same. Just once.
“That’s as efficient a way of killing yourself as I’ve ever heard of.” Chakotay shook his head. “He needs you to stay alive, Harry. Long enough to save him.”
Resentment bristled along Harry’s spine. To speak of Tom in the present tense, now, seemed like the worst kind of ignorance.
“And everyone else in the crew,” he said stubbornly.
“And everyone else.” Chakotay’s glance roamed across open space, but when it returned to him, it held all the usual, unrelenting will. “Don’t fool yourself. You’re doing this to save yourself as well.”
“I’d gladly give my life if that could—”
“So would I,” Chakotay cut in, with a true fervor of his own. “But you can’t extricate yourself from this bargain that you’ve struck with — fate, or whatever you may call it. You want this chance for yourself, for all of us. And for Tom.”
Harry managed a short nod. There was a fuse attached to this thought, and enough of a spark to start a chain reaction. “He discovered the phase variance. We should have stopped right there. I should’ve listened.”
“As I remember it, he backed you up in the final discussion,” Chakotay countered. “Tom trusted you.”
“He did...” Harry let his head drop into his hands.
Or we could do this Harry’s way... The memory sprang up clear and hard, like a glass etching, opalescent around its broken edges. Their improvised conference with the captain and its turning point, when Tom skipped answering his own question and nobody took notice.
“...with his life,” Harry finished his own sentence, after a lapse of several minutes.
Chakotay met his glance with mild exasperation and answered a different question. “With his heart, Harry.”
“Really.” The word scraped in his throat, harsh and graceless, as he stared back at Chakotay. How would you know?
“It was obvious enough,” Chakotay answered soberly. “Whenever Tom got into a difficult mood, everyone in the crew assumed you’d know what was wrong. B’Elanna even used to joke about it. Does Tom love me? Hard to tell, but why don’t you go and ask Harry.”
A small sound of startlement caught in Harry’s throat, brought up by a surge of warmth, a sense of long-forgotten, easy closeness. He pushed to his feet. “Doesn’t make a difference now, does it? The guy I was back then died in the slipstream.”
Instead of countering that, Chakotay clasped his hands behind his back. He’d always stood at attention like this, before the captain, his captain, and made it look as if he was completely at ease. Keeping an open mind.
Thanks for the memory, Harry almost shot back, I’d rather have my own.
He wanted to wrench away, just as he’d yanked his wrist out of Chakotay’s grip in the Delta Flyer, fourteen years ago, in shock and denial, but now he didn’t.
“I need to...” He waved a hand towards the garden. Air. Patches of smoldering daylight. The presence of no one and nothing that recognized him.
“Sure.” Chakotay stepped out of his way, wary once more of crossing too many lines.
Harry held his eyes till the fugue state dissipated and said, “thanks, all the same.”
He couldn’t outwalk memory when it came in flashes, crackling and running through the grass, always ready to overtake him.
The dusting of fine hair on Tom’s forearms that showed golden in a certain light, like sun-gleams darting across the skin.
The laugh lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes, revealing the rough years and smoothing them aside at the same time.
The sound of his voice when he said Harry, as if there was a special taste to his name.
All of these fragments, flung up like sparks from a distant fire.
If he stayed with it long enough, what other memories would he uncover? And what else might there be, that he’d buried under too much debris to retrieve? His recollection was unsound, and no matter what Chakotay thought, walking around in it didn’t really help focussing his energies on their plans.
He thought of Tom sprawling loose-limbed on his couch, and his throat still tightened in alarm. But he could also feel it now, awash under the tectonic plates from which he’d built his existence after Voyager. Grief like a wide underground water, seamless in the dark.
When he glanced around, he realized that he’d wandered up to Tessa’s workshop, on the western side of the farm buildings. He could hear her tinker with something, the clang of metal on metal, through the wide open doors.
A moment later, she showed up framed by the dark interior, her hair held back by a grubby bandanna. “Were you looking for me?”
“Not really. I was just.” Harry shrugged. “Kicking up memories.”
Tessa cocked her head, appraising his expression, and came out to meet him. “Mind if I keep you company?”
She was good with silence, it eased around her like air-currents over a streamlined hull. Afternoon pierced the trees, cast up halos of glittering wetness. The fitful outpour of recollection had ceased, but a different sensation grew on Harry, brushing the nape of his neck, like a presence separating from his own shadow. Walking in his footsteps. As if he might just glance back over his shoulder and —
“I wish I could have met him,” Tessa said softly.
“You would’ve liked him. A lot.”
As they strolled along under the trees, Harry pushed his hands into his pockets, folded up tight around nothing. Smells of damp soil were thick in the air, on his tongue, with a faint iron tang.
“You know,” he started after a while, picking a point on the very edges of reality, “I got thrown into a changed timeline once. I was back on Earth, not aboard Voyager. So was... so was Tom. We’d never even met. He’d really hit the bottom, he was—” Before the memory could grow too acute, Harry shook his head. “I went to find him and begged him to help me.”
“And he did.”
“He put up a fight first.” And this, more than anything, almost made him smile. “Everyone else thought I was either mad or a Maquis spy. But Tom showed up, helped me steal a shuttle and took me to the right coordinates. It was a one-way trip, Tess. We were seconds away from a core breach.”
Too clear and bright, all the pieces fell back into place, till he could hear Tom’s voice again. Tight and urgent, no time left for anything but a tough choice. Tom faced him with it, flushed with energy, eyes wide and a little wild.
“About the last thing he said to me...” It came out thick and slow. Harry swallowed. “If you’re right about this, you’ll find me back on Voyager.”
I owe you one, he remembered what he’d told Tom afterwards, within their own time. A promise he had yet to keep.
I’ve got to remind Harry, he thought with a sickening flash of urgency. Somehow.
“Maybe I shouldn’t.” Tessa slipped him a quick glance and shifted her shoulders. “But, Harry. Why did you never think — let yourself believe he could love you?”
“That was a different timeline. A different... expression of him.”
“But the same soul.”
He shook his head blindly. Pain gripped him round the throat and barely let him breathe. He kept walking till they’d reached the lagoon. A pall of mist shifted above the water, insubstantial, uncertain. He could see the shadows of fish slipping through the meshes of silver and dark green and anchored his gaze somewhere far from himself.
“There was a time. A chance. I didn’t take it.”
“What held you back?” Tessa asked.
“In one word? Fear.”
He moved closer to the water’s edge, the mist receding before him as it always did, instead of wrapping him up. The muddy ground sucked at his boots. Sunlight still spattered the edges of the fog, but somewhere at its heart a chill lay in wait.
“I’ve always been... a maintenance person, always wanted to preserve things as they were. Dig a hole, buckle down, that’s me. And that’s the whole appeal of engineering: calculable risks right down to the last decimal place.”
“But you chose Starfleet,” Tessa said from behind.
“Starfleet.” Harry pulled up his shoulders. “Not the Delta Quadrant. I didn’t realize at the time how very afraid I could be. The future... the future’s beyond calculations.” Inside his jacket’s pockets, he dug his fingernails into his palms. “Most of us wanted to go home — but to me that always meant going back.” He felt his face twist when it struck him in a cold blast. “I keep going back, don’t I, it’s what I do. I’m tired of it. Just... so tired.”
Dusk settled around them in fine shades of grey, and that, together with the mist, gave it all the appearance of a stasis chamber. Harry closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. Blinds drawn on the life he’d once had, a life kept in suspension, to resume when he was ready. How I wish. But what did it take?
“Here’s something that I’ve learned,” Tessa said with the gentle matter-of-factness she always applied when things got too personal and intense. “Love exists in a continuum apart from time. It just won’t play by the same rules.”
∞ ∞ ∞
STARDATE: UNKNOWN
Transporter technology involves a complex process by which the matrix of a living organism is taken up into energy and reconstructed, molecule by molecule, in a wash of brilliant light. Any malfunction, the slightest variance in the stored pattern, can lead to grotesque disfigurement and death. It’s an open question, though, how long a living organism may exist in suspension, in a potential state of being between regeneration and utter defacement. As he was brought back to Earth, Harry shifted in and out between those states, in permanent oscillation.
It began aboard the Delta Flyer, when his hands worked the operations console, but his mind had holes punched into it and could no longer formulate the objectives that directed these procedures. There was a judder in his backbone too, twisting him so hard that his teeth chattered. From the pilot’s seat, Chakotay made good use of his command voice until trained reflex took over and kept him functional. There was a surface mind, evidently, that still responded within the parameters of dutiful logic, a surface pattern of Harry Kim that cooperated, even then, with circumstance.
They docked the Flyer in the vast hangar of a Starfleet dreadnought — a ship ironically named the U.S.S. Integrity that’d picked up their hail — and were instantly hustled to sickbay for primary care. Thorough examinations followed. Who knew, after all, what kinds of deadly contaminants the slipstream travellers might carry. Swaddled in the fogs of sedatives and disbelief, they passed through preliminary interviews, the first round in many yet to come, and the stridently factual nature of these routines formed a carapace. A containment field, keeping all things at a distance.
Ensign Harry Kim, aged twenty-six, back from the Delta Quadrant, stood by for download. Over the distance, he listened to himself, the tedious outpour of data that Starfleet was eager to retrieve and evaluate. Here and not here. He was disturbed to realize that a temporary balance between these mutually exclusive states could exist.
Within days, they were back on Earth. Back within planetary atmosphere, surrounded by breathable air. The containment field began to waver at the first breath Harry drew of that air, a naked sky above and bright hollow sunlight washing over him. He could see nothing. He scratched his fingernails across his wrists, hard enough to break skin, until Chakotay, once more at his side, leaned over and murmured, “It’s real, Ensign.”
His parents arrived for the ceremony, and this travesty of a reunion, of a fantasy he’d sheltered four years long, began to crack the carapace. When his mother didn’t rush forward in a blaze of joy and just held out a hand — “forgive me, Harry, but I’m glad” — it was part of the terrible damage he’d done. Four years she’d been afraid for her only child, and this was what it came to. He couldn’t tell her “I’m not here,” and worked up a smile instead by gritting his teeth. They were trapped among flowers, flags and music, the whole of it doused in tactfully subdued lighting.
Together with Starfleet officials, his parents huddled him away from the families and friends of Voyager’s crew, all in mourning. These were people trained to anticipate a thousand possibilities of loss, not a lynch mob in the making, never mind what Harry might wish for. When his mother noticed his furtive glances, she read him wrong and said, “No one blames you, sweetheart, they all knew the risks.”
During the in memoriam speech that Chakotay gave, he held on to her hand. A cramped, painful grip. But when it was over and he let go, when the red spots on her skin registered with a potential for leaving bruises, he also noticed that his own hand remained as cold as before.
It was when the names were read out, beginning with Captain Kathryn Janeway and proceeding down the ranks from there, when each name was spoken aloud and given due space of silence, each about three seconds long, that he came out of oscillation. One hundred and fifty names, and he came out of it disfigured and shouting, mistaking the time count for his sentence. Three seconds was too short a time, and if Starfleet lacked the heart for executions, they should at least give him three years each. He was on his knees before a dramatic arrangement of tall white lilies when the medics swerved in, grappling and chattering like a pack of crows.
After that point, he remembered nothing beyond the hiss of the hypospray, the instant slackening effect that unlocked his fists and his jaw. They told him later that he’d lost several molars to grinding down too hard, and fixed him up with implants within a few weeks. It was the only physical mark of disaster that he carried.
∞ ∞ ∞
DELTA FLYER: STARDATE 71144.8
The Delta Flyer was immune to the passage of time. Sealed and dormant at shipyard for so long, it’d come back to life with the smooth familiar purr, its recycled air stirring up a scent that tightened Harry’s chest in recognition. Just the faintest trace of a scent, yet it blew and blossomed about him like the sweetest promise.
As it did in most adventure stories, the element of surprise had worked exquisitely in their favor. Due to a sophomoric faith in secrecy, security at T.I. Headquarters had been low, and the mock-up they’d left in place of the original Borg transmitter might even go undiscovered till time was no more. Hijacking the Delta Flyer had been the trickier job, but fifteen years after the slipstream ride, the detail of security officers in training didn’t recognize the survivors’ faces when they separated from a group of visiting scientists. Surveillance registered nothing unusual before the Delta Flyer flushed with power. Moments later, the shuttle zipped through closing space doors, to a fanfare of station-wide alarms. When the warp drive came online, the thrill of speed took Harry’s breath away and plastered him into his seat.
He was forty-one, but he felt younger than he had in all the years after Voyager.
He spent most of their time in warp adjusting work stations in the aft compartment, studying the temporal transmitter. Such an intricate thing, each interplexing module designed to signal through subspace, where, Harry supposed, a rebound sequence between subspace manifolds served to revert time. It had the look of a prototype, too, most of the circuitry still exposed to highlight the transmission flow. Like the diagram of a living heart.
Harry curled his fingers around it. And from here we’ll go till we’ve never been. Temporal paradox had become a dialect he spoke without stumbling.
When he settled the transmitter back into its padded case, his hair fell into his eyes. He’d stopped having it cut months ago, when it ceased to matter because they were getting out soon. A small step to signal that he was leaving himself behind, but it still brought him an odd sense of freedom.
“Cutting back to impulse in forty-five,” Chakotay’s voice over comm link called him to the bridge.
With a nod for Tessa at operations, Harry took the science seat. Long range sensors augmented their readings as soon as the Delta Flyer dropped out of warp in the Takara sector. From the dark expanse of space blazed a single star, and Harry’s display showed a first visual of the class-L planet that looked nothing at all like his simulacrum. A sparkling gem crusted with cloud swirls and the glittering spires of mountains below. The sight of it went through him till he felt he was breathing ice.
Fifteen years, and here they’d blown over in perfect stasis, shock-frozen when Voyager hit the planet surface.
A hard chill wound itself about Harry’s spine. Their flight beyond the edges of the Alpha Quadrant had taken them back in time, to a point where the crash was less than an hour past. One last gap that his phase corrections would have to close.
Tempting fate, Chakotay called it, and fate had better accommodate them. Failsafe, as he’d wanted to make them, his corrections weren’t. The fluctuating factor in the slipstream threshold remained a phantom outside every frame of reference. All Harry could do, in a laborious process that took five more months, was hedge it in a dense network of probability calculations — and pray the net held. No time, he told himself, no time left for doubt now.
“Five minutes, and I’ll take us into orbit,” Chakotay announced with a carefully measured quiet.
The week before they left Menzara III, he’d disappeared for a day and a night, taking himself through private rituals that he wouldn’t discuss, not even with Tessa. Some sort of spiritual cleansing procedure, Harry assumed. Perhaps Chakotay had tried to administer something similar to him. A forced breakdown to salvage his humanity and satisfy the demands of higher conscience. Pure motives made a difference to Chakotay. Love did.
Harry turned his head to look out through the starboard viewport, towards the primary that hung suspended in the sea of night. He kept remembering what Tessa had said about the atemporal nature of love, too.
Guilt, he realized, guilt was different. He’d thought he knew all there was to know about it: not one of his counselors and therapists had been able to dislodge that conviction and surprise him. But guilt was linear, it required the succession of cause and effect, to infiltrate past, present, and future. And soon all those linear threads would be cut.
He could already feel it, like an old burn mark down the middle of his chest, a seam that would burst wide open when time collapsed on itself. He wondered how much of it Chakotay and Tessa could sense.
The night before they’d set out, there’d been a huge fight between the two of them, the only fight Harry had witnessed in all the years. Flying objects, broken dishes, the works. Awake in his guestroom, he’d listened to them shouting and took a strange encouragement from that outburst of passion. At some point, Tessa thrust the patio doors open so hard they screeched, and he could hear her voice very clearly, as piercing as the starlight that filled the upper half of his window.
“What does it matter?” she asked. “What difference does it make if I sit here and wait for this timeline to evaporate, or if I’m part of the evaporation itself, out there?”
Chakotay’s voice was gravelly after all that shouting. “If we fail—”
“We won’t. And I’m going to help you make it happen.”
“Tessa.”
“I know,” she said wearily. “You’re worried about being remembered. In any timeline. But I won’t be the carrier of that memory.” Her voice grew sharp again. “That was our deal, remember? My capacity’s full up.”
“It’s not that,” Chakotay answered, in an injured tone. “It’s not memory that I’m worried about. It’s you.” But he was already giving in.
Indistinct murmurs made way for the small, disjointed sounds of night, then the patio doors slid shut again. Harry lay awake in his bed for a long time afterwards and listened to the creek purl underneath his window, wondering what Tessa had meant by saying she couldn’t carry additional memories. And he realized, with some regret, that he’d never asked about her personal history, about the losses that might account for her readiness to join a suicide mission. It was too late for that now. And she’d always seemed like the most balanced person he knew.
“Initiating sensor sweep,” Tessa said briskly as they swung into orbit around the second planet.
Chakotay glanced back at her, one corner of his mouth lifting. “Acknowledged, Crewman.”
“Yeah, I almost feel like one,” she muttered with a grin.
Outside the viewport, the teeth of immense mountains stabbed through the clouds, a planetscape drawn in shades of white, from slick glittering brilliant ice to a sullen paper-white.
And from that pallor of the dead, Harry remembered reading somewhere, a long time ago, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them.
“I’ve got the coordinates,” Tessa said, on a strange hollow note that might be awe or apprehension. “She’s under ice.”
Harry keyed the readings to his console and for long moments stared at the data that identified Voyager. No energy traces and no bio-signs, only the broken glimmers of bioneural circuitry frozen at the initial stage of decomposition. Duranium and tritanium signatures outlined a deformed shell — metrics didn’t match either, the hull’s total height registered at forty-five meters now, instead of sixty-six. What the screen showed him was a skewed, dislocated skeleton retaining pockets of uncompressed space like black pits.
“All that ice makes no difference to the transporter, but we’ll want closer readings before going in.” Tessa swiveled her seat towards him. “Dress up, Harry. You’re on the away team.”
Yes, ma’am hovered at the tip of his tongue and he bit down hard on it as he went aft, steadying himself with a hand to the bulkhead.
A set of basic environmental suits, procured by a Ferengi dealer, gleamed from the very back of the compartment. State of the art they weren’t, but enough to keep the freezing cold at bay and filter out any toxic components in the air. Harry tightened the straps that held up the trousers, drawing a sharp breath against the pressure beneath his ribcage. Another minute, and he was going down — down to the planet surface and below, to walk around in the tracks of disaster — and an angry pull opened up inside him in response.
“Got everything you need?” Tessa came down the steps and watched as he fumbled with the clasps of the stiff, insulating jacket.
Harry gave a nod, half transformed as he was into a shapeless creature, covered in chromo-metallic fabric.
Everything ahead of them was fixed in place like cogs and wheels, they’d discussed and reviewed every step. He’d head for sickbay himself and activate the Doctor, retrieve his emitter so he could operate aboard the Flyer. Chakotay had offered to take on the worst, enter the frozen bridge and locate Seven among... the other bodies.
Harry glanced around the compartment, the stainless bulkheads and tightly packed control panels. This was where his time would go out, if all went well. He’d work with the Doctor while Chakotay and Tessa dodged pursuit and bought them as much leeway as they could. Pursuit was inevitable. Sooner or later, Starfleet would arrive on the scene, to intercept and stop them — it was a mere matter of timing.
Timing, he would say later, is everything.
When Tessa held out the self-sealing gloves, Harry breathed out raggedly and said, “Tessa—”, but words couldn’t cover a fraction of this moment between times. He took her hand instead of the glove, heat pricking strangely in his eyes.
She said, “go on, we’re all set!” and smiled.
Only the Doctor had emerged from the devastation unchanged. Brusque and easily irritated, but unfailingly efficient at work. Then again, he’d only seen the interior of sickbay, roughcast with frost, not the hallways and the Jefferies tubes, too many chambers in a glacial tomb. Not the bodies. Except one.
Seven — reasonably well-preserved, according to the Doctor — lay on the biobed in the Delta Flyer’s aft, where the EMH was carefully extracting the interplexing beacon from her brain. Without its translink frequency, they couldn’t send the phase corrections.
Harry retreated to the other side of the room when the Doctor opened Seven’s skull. This would take hours, no help for it, even though a Federation ship was already scanning the sector for them. All he could do was stand by. He’d prepared both the transmission and the transmitter. He’d checked every console, every interface and power coupling repeatedly.
For the first time in almost fifteen years, he’d reached a complete standstill. The constant processes running through his head — painstakingly adding one logical step to the next, one variable in each equation to the next, aware that several million lay ahead till Voyager could be saved — had stopped. It left a drizzle like white noise behind, a great white nothing.
That pallor of the dead, Harry remembered again, and now he recalled that this quaintly twisted line was part of Moby Dick, one of Tom’s replicated books about adventures at sea. With a cold, precise thrill, the quote returned to him in Tom’s voice. There’d been a night when Tom had read him some of his favorite passages. Beginning with the description of Captain Ahab’s scar.
It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.
Still greenly alive, but branded. Tom had repeated that part, oddly fascinated.
Harry’s breath caught, and he lowered himself on the padded bench. Stiff with the cold silence of Voyager, with the need to keep this memory unbroken. He recalled commenting on the morbid detail in the description. Wondering if Tom found something of himself reflected in that portrayal. Hadn’t asked him about it, though.
Could be me these days. Harry knotted his fingers between his knees. Perhaps Tom had felt less isolated, less obliged to put up a smooth front, in the company of that literary misfit. Quoting books or old movies had been his way of talking seriously about himself. Most times his only way.
Recollection flared with polar energies that brought Harry back to his feet. It took him in a scalding blast, luxury or punishment, he couldn’t tell anymore, only that his heartbeat was pounding out of time, and memories were all he had. Here, with Seven’s body on the biobed and the temporal transmitter waiting like a transplant to revive her, he couldn’t deny them. Perhaps the time reversal should begin with turning them loose. Each a charred fragment escaping the fire.
B’Elanna’s bursts of frantic, inspired activity. Tuvok’s gaze sweeping his kal-toh sphere with something close to pleasure. Seven’s frowning attempts at humor. The jolts and starts that defined Neelix’ body language whenever he got excited. All that, and the captain’s voice, the husky tone that carried more feeling than command training recommended.
He’d never touched these memories before, he’d kept them sealed up like a last energy reserve. Like a bullet to the head. He recalled Captain Janeway’s final demand, too, the pressure behind every word: I need an answer. We’re running out of time.
But before that, seconds before, there was Tom’s voice — I’m still waiting for Harry — and then: I’m receiving the phase corrections.
Harry squeezed his numb fingers until they shook. It was the last thing he’d heard Tom say before the comm link shut down, in a tone that still held on tight to confidence. But after that, when Voyager was hurtled from the slipstream, when the drive went offline and the deflector failed, exposing the vulnerable hull, when the ship went into a tailspin and Tom still fought to land her somewhere, there must have come a moment when his trust broke. Perhaps he’d had no time, no breath left to curse Harry, but the knowledge itself must have struck to the heart at some point, prior to the moment of his death.
Damn you, damn you to hell and back.
Yes, Tom, I’ve been there.
Harry let a thin breath go, depleting himself till nothing but the burn at the bottom of his lungs remained. The Doctor was still bent over Seven’s lifeless form, while he delivered the memory that he’d dreaded through all of fifteen years. Give or take a few weeks. He owed Tom that much, for taking his life.
Harry could almost see him now, turning back from the conn to toss him a grin and mouth something the captain wasn’t supposed to hear. A spark snapping, catching fire before it blew out.
A breath, a spark, everything. As present as if it had been yesterday, as if it were now.
His time was almost up, and it lightened his step when he approached the log recorder embedded in the wall panels. He still needed to get a message through to Harry.To the kid who’d turned into a separate entity over time, wrapped up in his false fears, his false securities.
During flight to the Takara sector, he’d programmed the temporal transmitter for a delay of point-five seconds. A crucial precaution, to compensate for the transmission time itself and ensure that the signal designed to save Voyager couldn’t disintegrate when the future source of that signal evaporated. By means of this same delay, he could also slip a message through the gap between times.
When Harry activated the recording, his hands had stopped shaking. This, too, would have to be remembered, if only in the vaguest terms. His shoulders settled as he voiced the message he’d long fixed in his mind. Like a retrograde hope.
Hello, Harry. I don't have much time, so listen to me. Fifteen years ago, I made a mistake and one hundred and fifty people died. I've spent every day since then regretting that mistake, but if you're watching this right now, that means all of that has changed. You owe me one.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. CHALLENGER: STARDATE 71144.8
Voyager had been found, and not by Starfleet. Kim and Chakotay, assisted by a woman from a backwater colony, had managed to track their lost ship down to a desolate sector outside the Alpha Quadrant. Geordi La Forge retreated to his ready room in a state of restless indignation. Starfleet had let these people down, and it set his teeth on edge.
If ‘Fleet had expended just a little more of their precious resources a decade ago, Voyager’s crew would have received the homecoming they’d earned, if only to memorial rites with full honors. A decade ago, there’d still been a chance for Kim and Chakotay to learn how to live with their loss. But Starfleet had turned them loose instead, left them to twist grief and guilt into denial. And from all that came an insane scheme to reinstate the past. At the cost of fifteen years. The entire galaxy, for all La Forge knew, would pay the price. Unless he did ‘Fleet’s dirty work for them and took these fugitives out on their home stretch.
“I’ve located them,” his Operations officer, a Bolian ensign, reported from the bridge. “They’re in low orbit around the second planet.”
“Hail them.” La Forge dropped into his chair. Damned if he didn’t try to negotiate a way out of this worst-case impasse. Even though Command might advise the shoot first, ask questions later treatment.
Chakotay, distinguished by his tattoo and swaths of grey in his hair, was at the Delta Flyer’s helm. A soft-spoken man, wearing a clouded expression La Forge had seen too many times before. As if he looked back on life across an immense distance.
“We’re here to save one hundred and fifty lives,” Chakotay said. “Our crew.” He knew the stakes. No doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing.
“I understand,” La Forge answered, because he did, “and I might be doing the same thing if I were in your position, but I’ve got my own crew to protect, not to mention fifteen years of history.” Some of the pressure filtered into his tone. “So I’m asking you again. Stand down, and return the transmitter.”
Something like overheating plasma roiled near his middle, and he’d lowered his voice instinctively, to regain control. This should never have happened was in no way a prudent response to despair.
“You know I can’t do that.” Chakotay’s expression didn’t change in the least, he gave nothing away.
“And you know I have to try to stop you,” La Forge returned.
And where was Kim meanwhile? Experimenting with the Borg transmitter somewhere in the background, he supposed. Too bad, he couldn’t help thinking, he would’ve preferred to talk to the man, one engineer to another. There had to be common ground in the passion for fixing things. For emergency solutions.
“Yes, I know,” Chakotay said in that soft, level-headed tone. “Good luck.” And he obviously meant it.
“Same to you.” It slipped out, but La Forge couldn’t regret it, not even when it occurred to him that Command might want to review his communications with the fugitives later. So let them.
With his next breath, he ordered Tactical to target the shuttle’s engines. Cripple the small craft, tractor it in. No casualties. That was the grand total of his plan. Of course, suicidal renegades cared nothing for their own safety, you might even do them a favor by blasting them to eternity. But he couldn’t comply. No favors from me, Chakotay.
Minutes later, La Forge admitted that he’d failed to wrap his mind fully around that suicidal logic, or he might have predicted their final maneuver. At the cost of heavy damage, they broke the tractor’s hold with a plasma surge. Challenger’s sensors picked up a dangerous overload in the Delta Flyer’s warp core. They had less than three minutes left.
La Forge gripped the armrests of his seat, tense through every muscle, as if his own ship’s core were about to breach. He could just wait it out now. Let them have their fiery end, mission accomplished. Judiciously timed inaction was among the qualities Starfleet expected from their command staff, after all. Too bad, but he couldn’t comply with that either.
Eleven years ago, he’d done nothing to stop Data. He’d watched and waited, frozen in the halo of sacrifice. He couldn’t do the same for a desperate waste of lives, he could still save these people from themselves.
La Forge had the channel reopened to give it one last try. They’d lost their gambit, by now they had to realize that. And what could you count on, if not survival instinct?
“Lower your shields, we’ll beam you out of there.”
He looked into Chakotay’s eyes — the woman was beside him now, poised and silent — when the goddamn bastard told him no yet again.
And it was over. The Delta Flyer broke apart, blossomed into white fire. Then nothing.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
(Herman Melville, Moby Dick)
Timeless : Coda
2375, DELTA QUADRANT
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52144.9
Hello, Harry.
I don’t have much time, so listen to me.
Fifteen years ago, I made a mistake and one hundred and fifty people died.
I’ve spent every day since then regretting that mistake, but if you’re watching this right now,
that means all of that has changed.
You owe me one.
It was incomprehensible. Like white figures written on white, like a truth that canceled itself out even as it formed. Fifteen years. Alone. The sheer mass of guilt punching holes into reality. Stopping time with your bare hands. Unthinkable.
Harry’s fingers felt numb when he paused the recording again, at the exact point where his older self turned aside. Mere moments, Harry guessed, before he’d died — more accurately, before his timeline collapsed, though it seemed impossible not to think of it as dying. Fifteen years, to make up for one fatal mistake. To violate history and the Temporal Prime Directive. All of it gone now, like a mad fantasy.
Except for this, the face and voice of a future he wouldn’t live, the haunted look of his mirror self at forty-one. All the grey in his hair. Eyes too large and too dark in that peaked face. And how was it even possible for the message to exist in this timeline? Though part of his brain wanted to take refuge with mathematics, employ the principle of nonlinear systems towards a plausible equation, he knew he was only trying to distract himself.
Poised on the edge of his couch, the PADD on the table before him, Harry wrapped his arms around himself. As much as his mind was still tied into knots, his body had already assimilated the truth, chill through his bones, a cold weight in his stomach. He kept playing and replaying the message, to test his hold on reality.
The chirp of his combadge dislodged a densely layered silence. “Paris to Kim.”
Tom’s voice jolted him like an electrical charge. He needed a moment to reply, and out came a startled “I’m here.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tom answered with a hint of dry humor. “Just outside your quarters.”
Harry trailed his glance to the door. “Why don’t you just come in?”
“Didn’t want to override the privacy lock,” Tom replied tersely, “unless there’s an emergency.”
“I’m sorry.” Harry took a steadying breath to voice his command to the computer and switched off the PADD.
He should’ve known that Tom would sense something wrong, only he hadn’t counted on it to happen quite so soon, not when the whole ship was still struggling to reconfigure their hopes and their duties — but he really hadn’t thought about it at all.
His friend strode in briskly, as if he actually expected an emergency. Coiled like a spring, Harry thought.
“Hey,” he said softly, gesturing for Tom to have a seat. “What’s up?”
“I was going to ask you,” Tom answered as he plunked down on the couch next to Harry and stretched his long legs. “Thought you’d return to the bridge after the slipstream’d shut down.”
His presence was a relief and yet it wasn’t, another distraction adding to the swirl of nervous unrest. Trapped in his own reactions, Harry laced his fingers. “The captain ordered me to take some time off.”
“Don’t take it too hard.” Tom shot him a searching glance. “We gave it a try, it didn’t work out. So now we’ll get rid of the drive from hell.” His tone grew sharper by the moment, and his fingers twitched against the padded armrest. “They’re already at it, down in Engineering. Taking it apart. Can’t say I’ll be sorry to see it gone.”
Harry stared at him. The drag of temporal paradox was like a fog, making it hard to follow. “Seriously?”
“Why not? What purpose did it ever serve, except for pulling us all apart?” Tom was on his feet again as if tugged upward, and started to pace. Upset and clearly off-balance.
Whatever had caused this burst of frustration, Harry had no idea, so he just kept his eyes on Tom. Every step he took snapped with tension that surged in the space between them. Magnetizing the atmosphere.
“No, let me rephrase that,” Tom added when he’d covered the distance between the couch and the viewport. “It did serve a purpose. Pulled some things out into the open that were long overdue.” He stopped abruptly.
Most of the time, when Tom couldn’t get a grip on his own temper, he’d spell things out to himself while Harry listened, but now he pulled to a halt in front of the viewport, hands clenching at his sides. Leaving Harry to guess at the likeliest cause.
“Are you talking about... B’Elanna?”
“Yeah.” Tom let his head fall back and pushed both hands through his hair. “The closer we got to going home... well, turned out that neither of us could really see the future happening, nothing like — settling down with each other.”
“We’ve all been under a lot of stress lately,” Harry said cautiously.
“It’s not that.” Tom snorted. “You’ve seen us. We fight, we make up, we move in circles. So we finally agreed that we just can’t make it work.”
“You — what?” Harry shook his head, trying to absorb that. Or maybe trying not to, refusing to believe. “When did that happen?”
“The last time we played Captain Proton? I went to talk to B’Elanna right afterwards.”
Only two nights ago, though now it seemed like an infinitely dilated time span.
Tom shrugged. “I guess it pulled me loose long enough to put things in perspective. Like I needed that kind of energy to confront the truth.”
His voice was still edged with anger, battling it out with an undercurrent of defeat. Perhaps he wanted to disbelieve himself and just needed the right kind of trigger.
“But, Tom.” Harry spread his hands and still couldn’t think fast enough. “After all this time—”
“You wanna know what happened?” Tom finally turned back around, his face pale and set. “Remember when I got trapped in that ion storm with Tuvok and Wildman, and the Delta Flyer crashed? The odds weren’t exactly in our favor, so we got to the point of recording goodbye messages. I thought I ought to tell B’Elanna... something. And then I ended up talking about old pizza and Captain Proton. Good thing she never saw the recording.”
Harry bit down on an impulse to argue. Absurd, really, that he wanted to defend the potential he’d thought their relationship had. Sticking with it, just as he stuck with every conviction once formed. At length he settled for, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to,” Tom answered. “I was going to, just last night. Only you weren’t up for company.” He waved a hand when Harry opened his mouth to apologize. “No, it’s alright, you had different things on your mind.”
His gaze began to drift — and that made sense at least, now that another reliable constant in his life was gone. It made sense of his strange moods during the past few days, too.
“So. I screwed up again.” Tom met his eyes with a heated look, like a demand for judgement. A jolt of adrenaline stiffened Harry’s spine. The truth sinking in, perhaps.
“Who says it was your fault?”
“Who says it wasn’t?” Tom shot back.
I would. Harry didn’t try to argue. In a temper like this, Tom would just shrug it off as blind loyalty and insist on taking sarcastic potshots at himself.
“What can I do?” he asked what he normally wouldn’t, because it was part and parcel of being friends, only the day had been too long and its aftershocks kept unsettling his responses.
He’d almost expected something caustic in return, but Tom shook his head, the tight set of his jaw loosening a little. “Nothing to be done about it,” he said, and then, abruptly, “Are you okay?”
To try and pretend was useless. Even under ordinary circumstances, Tom could read his face like a book.
“Not really,” Harry answered and tried to soften that by dredging up a smile.
“You thought you’d be home tonight.” Tom gestured impatiently. “Yeah, I know, you spent the past weeks practically wrapped around the slipstream drive. Couldn’t wait to get away from the Delta Quadrant. From Voyager.” Hurt flashed in his eyes. So clear and present that Harry wondered if he’d add: From me.
“That’s not it.” Suddenly his throat threatened to close up.
“Right. You miscalculated.” Tom paused, but then he pulled himself loose and returned to the couch. Dropped down heavily, as if the room’s gravity had been raised by a point or two. “C’mon, don’t tear yourself up over it. It was a risk worth taking.”
“No.” Harry bit his lip and tried again, his voice barely more stable the second time around. “No, it wasn’t.”
Tom turned a watchful gaze on him. Full of concern, full of questions and half-fledged answers. “What’s wrong?” He put out a hand and touched Harry’s arm. “You’re shaking.”
And once he’d wrapped his mind around the whole of it, he might just fall apart, unzipped down the middle. Fifteen years. Reality unravelling at the seams. Harry cleared his throat. “Something happened.”
“I can tell,” Tom said quietly.
Even if he’d had more time to absorb the blow, it would have been hard to explain. The cold grip on his insides tightened again, and he didn’t really want to talk about it, most likely he never would. So keep it to yourself. He used to be good at that, but now he couldn’t.
“Let me show you something.” Harry reached for the PADD, his pulse flying.
When he’d started the recording, he turned his eyes away from the screen to watch Tom as the message played itself out. Fifteen years, his older self said calmly. Fifteen years into a future that no longer existed. One hundred and fifty people died.
Beside him, Tom hunched forward, arms resting on his knees. The muscles in his jaw worked. He shook his head once, a cramped motion.
“You owe me one,” the tired voice repeated, and the image folded. Tom straightened and crossed his arms as if to shield himself.
“Now that sounds like you. Just barely.” His voice was soft with disbelief, or shock, or something else entirely.
Whatever Harry had meant to answer — there wasn’t a clear thought behind the impulse anyway — caught in his throat. Only a small, broken sound came out, and now he could actually feel himself tremble. He pushed to his feet.
“Hell. If I’d known.” Tom looked up at him, his expression undone to show nothing but trouble. “Harry... I’m sorry. If I’d guessed, I wouldn’t have — barged in and ranted like I did.” He grimaced. “Aren’t you glad to have a friend like me?”
Harry pulled up his shoulders. “How could you know?”
But now he needed to put a distance between them, between himself and that impossible glimpse of the future. It should be impossible, prohibited by every natural law. He stalked up to the viewport, taking Tom’s place of a few minutes before, yet the sight of silver-pricked darkness out there did nothing to ease his mind.
His future self had left a message from the edge of deliverance, when the worst was almost over. A guardian angel, in the captain’s words. His name is Harry Kim.
But she only knew of the transmission to Seven and its temporal displacement. She hadn’t watched the recording before handing it over to him, no one else had. And perhaps it had been a mistake, showing it to Tom, because the essence of temporal paradox could spill over into the present.
“Harry.” With slow, determined steps, Tom walked up to stand right behind him. Offering backup. “I know the feeling. Believe me, I know.”
The sound of his voice, thick with recollection, made it through to Harry much faster than rational comprehension. Guilt, that’s what Tom was talking about, the sickened realization that struck like a storm tide.
One small error, split second miss, several lives lost. Caldik Prime.
“Alright, so it’s not quite the same.” Close behind him, Tom moved again, his hands settling lightly on Harry’s shoulders. “How could it be? I’m still alive. Everyone else is. You came back to correct the mistake.”
Harry shook his head. Deep in his chest, something clawed every breath apart, and he couldn’t seem to relax into anything like a natural rhythm. In. Out. He clamped his teeth together. “I’m the one who made the mistake, Tom. Not the guy who took fifteen years to undo it.”
“You’re one and the same,” Tom answered softly, as if he wasn’t sure what that meant himself, but his grip on Harry’s shoulders tightened. “You came back. Look at me.”
He didn’t resist when Tom turned him around, slowly, to face him. “I thought I could handle the phase corrections. I was wrong.”
“It was a near-miss all the same. Never happened.” Tom tipped his head back, in the general direction of the PADD on the table. “And I don’t ever want to see you looking like that.”
Something sharp and unbalanced flashed in his blue eyes. Something that started a tremor in Harry’s gut. This wasn’t the same reality anymore. Last night, he’d braced for a homecoming, and now the slipstream drive was history, Tom and B’Elanna had broken up. Every muscle in his back tensed. He was fighting something and didn’t know what. Time?
“Harry.” Tom’s voice wavered strangely.
One of his hands detached from Harry’s shoulder, and something like a cool draft brushed his skin before Harry even felt the touch to his face. Tom’s fingers trailed along his cheek and jaw, soft and questioning, and it startled him so much that his eyes closed, because Tom had never touched him like this before, except —
Just yesterday, by the Delta Flyer, the memory burst on him. Tom had come to see him off. They’d kissed. A thousand small sensations crawled over his skin. But he hadn’t remembered that at all, not until now. And there was more, too, the strange ripple, distorting vision and mind. A giddy tremor rushed through him, and he shook himself. Tom’s hand dropped away.
“Guess that’s a no.” Tom’s features tightened, focused themselves into a mask of detachment, only he wasn’t so good at fabricating it anymore, and maybe he’d forgotten that Harry could see right through it.
He shook his head again, in reflex more than anything. Right then it seemed as if the ground under his feet was tilting slowly aside and reality might disintegrate if he moved at all. Harry pushed a hand through this hair. “Tom. Is this real?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” But a thought snapped in his glance, hardened it instantly. “Oh. You don’t think I’m serious?”
Tom made it a challenge, so intense it lit everything about him, his pale features, those high gleams in his hair, and his eyes — like water shot through with sunflares.
Harry took a short, sharp breath before he said, “I don’t know what to think,” which was nothing but honest fact, although it didn’t truly answer Tom’s question. “I just... don’t know.”
Perhaps part of him did, though, the part that stirred in recognition at Tom’s touch, close beneath his skin. Energized with a reckless hope. But he’d kept so much blocked out and silenced for so long, he didn’t know how to respond anymore.
We could be in another timeline, the thought swept in, out of nowhere, perhaps resetting the past caused a temporal fracture — and the chill he’d felt earlier crept up his spine again. In theory, such a fracturing was certainly possible, but perhaps the notion mostly reflected his current state of mind. And how could he hope for proof that this was the reality he knew and recalled when he couldn’t rely on his own memory anymore?
Tom was still watching him with a guarded look. “Listen,” he said finally, “I’m sorry if I got something wrong. I thought you’d — whatever.” He stepped back with a one-shouldered shrug. “Or maybe I just got tired of waiting.”
Harry needed another long moment to take that in. “C’mon, Tom.” He swallowed thickly. “You don’t mean to tell me you’ve been waiting ever since we had that talk, that was — almost four years ago...”
“No, I don’t suppose I can claim that.” Tom’s mouth twisted with a disparaging sort of humor. He could hardly deny all the flirts, crushes and affairs that’d peppered his time aboard Voyager, before B’Elanna became a factor. “Still, I was. Kind of like the way I used to wait for rainbows as a kid. They’re unpredictable.”
“They’re not, not really,” Harry’s engineer mind answered for him, working through weather conditions, air pressure, angles of light and observation.
Tom raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I discovered that myself, thanks, Dr. Kim. Spoils the magic though.”
He was pulling back, Harry could tell, a disillusioned attitude settling into place again, triggered by long habit. “Tom,” he started. “It’s not—” But the thought fell apart before he could nail it, and perhaps the whole trouble was that he could only frame answers in the negative. “After all that’s happened today,” he tried again. “I’m not sure this is the right time.”
Tom narrowed his eyes. “If that’s a charitable way of saying there’s never going to be a right time, I’d prefer the plain version.”
“That’s not what I meant.” It came out more forceful than he’d intended, but something in Tom’s expression eased, like shutters folding back. “There’s so much involved,” Harry went on. “The slipstream, the fact that time was changed — that I went back to erase fifteen years. Somehow that’s bound to affect time, continuity...”
His glance flew past Tom’s shoulder, to an empty space that filled with the face of his unlived future. What is it that I owe you?
“That’s a possibility, I guess,” Tom said soberly. “But I wouldn’t know the first thing about it. We had a bumpy ride, the quantum drive shut down, that’s all I can tell you.”
“I know.” And it would take solid, rational analysis, when he was capable of it, to figure through all the consequences. Since he wasn’t at the moment, Harry followed mere impulse, took one step forward, if only to stop feeling so lost within this uncharted reality, and gripped Tom’s hand. “I can’t even think straight at the moment, give me some time, okay?”
“Sure, Harry.” Tom’s voice was still laced with tension, and it showed when his fingers wrapped hard around Harry’s, giving them a short squeeze. “But when you’re done, tell me one thing. Are we going to be just another near-miss?”
And with that he turned aside and moved towards the door.
Harry watched him leave, like a fade-out in an old movie that didn’t allow for interaction. Couldn’t let himself want because wanting implied the future and the future had just broken down. But he had to say something.
“Tom... I’m afraid.”
“Of the time thing?” Tom glanced back over his shoulder. “Or is it... this? Me.”
Harry worked up a smile that carried half a wish, and half an apology. “I’m not good with change. You know that.”
“But this.” Tom held his gaze across the distance that he denied with a quick, fierce gesture. Indicating a connection between them, a possibility. “It’s not such a new thing.”
“It’s not,” he acknowledged.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52145.3
Digits flashed on the screen as the transmission went through — he focused, this was the Delta Flyer’s aft, the array of panels he’d designed himself — and with every fractal sequence, every split second, his pulse thinned down to a thread. Not long now, not long — the Flyer rocked madly and the shockwave seized his entire body, wrenched out the tension of years in a single shout of triumph, of joy — fifteen years, a brilliant burst in his heart, a burst of light.
Harry sat upright in his bed, chest burning as he fought for breath. Ambient controls brought up the lighting at a shout he must have given and showed him the familiar details of his quarters, all solid and unchanged. The more he stared around, the less he remembered what he’d dreamed. Only the sensation of breathing something too volatile to be oxygen. And a roar that stormed him and flushed him with adrenaline like nothing ever had, till the bright chills were pressing outward through his skin.
As he walked around the room, he took comfort from recognition. His uniform was right where he’d put it last night, folded atop the refresher, and the PADD lay on the table, with the message from the future still intact. Harry placed it on the shelf and swallowed against a dull ache in his back teeth. Get a grip, nothing’s wrong. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that reality had been dislodged, that a dimensional shift of some kind kept taunting him from the corner of his eye. Or was it just the shift in his own perception, something like a parallax effect? A simple change of observer position, and every angle and distance would seem to realign. Harry rubbed a shiver out of his bare arms. There was more, though, like that odd lapse in his memory, there was —
Tom. A familiar pang tightened his chest. He’d waited so long. And now Tom claimed that he’d been waiting, which made no sense in the ordinary run of things. But it scattered his pulse and hollowed him out, just to think that maybe —
Harry pushed the notion aside before it could take over all his thinking, as it was bound to sooner or later.
He took stock slowly, beginning with unquestionable fact: time had collapsed on itself to start over. So he activated his console to download everything on time travel and temporal anomalies that Voyager’s databanks provided. In under a second, the file index totalled several thousand and made him feel restless again. His usual approach resembled nothing so much as a diversion, a pointless waste of time.
All the trouble was tied to the slipstream, both the incursion from the future and the distortions he’d experienced. Once he’d showered and dressed, that realization took him straight to Deck Eleven.
Main Engineering was a hive of activity, presenting him with an obstacle course past towering crates and disassembled equipment. Of the dozen crewmen at work around the reaction chamber, only a few acknowledged him with a nod or a glance. And for all the noise, a hush had taken hold of the mood, like a dampening field.
B’Elanna had retreated to her office, but not alone, Harry could see from the doorway. Chakotay was with her, leaning close, and their soft-voiced exchange stopped him in his tracks. He was about to turn aside when something about Chakotay — the way he’d angled his shoulders as if to shield B’Elanna — brushed him with an uncomfortable tingle, like a missing memory, something he couldn’t place. Had Chakotay been part of it all, in that erased future, another survivor who couldn’t live with Voyager’s destruction?
“Harry,” said B’Elanna.
Now that she’d spotted him, he stepped inside instead of hovering like an eavesdropper. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You aren’t,” Chakotay answered for her. “I’m expected back on the bridge.”
“If you have another moment,” Harry stopped him before he could shoulder past. “Commander. Can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” Chakotay kept his expression impassive by habit, but there was a grim cast to it now.
“When the quantum drive engaged for the first time, during our test run,” Harry rushed it out, “I noticed something like a ripple, a distortion that seemed to affect my vision. B’Elanna asked around, but nobody else had felt it.” From the back of her office, she confirmed that with a grunt. “It happened again when I was about to board the Delta Flyer,” Harry added. “Yesterday morning.”
Even before he could voice his question, a flicker showed at the back of Chakotay’s eyes. “And now you’re wondering if I felt something like it?” His glance swept past Harry, towards the reactor core. “Yes,” he said after a moment, “but it passed so quickly, I didn’t even recall it until now. A moment’s dizziness, nothing more.”
“I see.” Perhaps relief showed too clearly on his face, because Chakotay gave him a hard look.
“If you’ll excuse me now.” With a sharp nod, he was gone.
“Harry,” B’Elanna said again, in that same brusque tone. “What was that all about?”
“Still trying to figure things out,” he answered vaguely. “What went wrong.”
“Pretty much everything, wouldn’t you say?” B’Elanna tossed her head and stepped over to the wall console, every movement taut with impatience.
Was it Tom, the break-up, Harry wondered uneasily, was it the failure of the drive — her own complex design — or a blend of both that converged on nothing but loss? He was still fumbling for the right way of asking about it when she swung back around.
“What are you doing here anyway? I thought the captain gave you the day off.”
“But couldn’t you use some help with dismantling the drive? From the look of things—”
“Engineering’s going to be a mess for days, get used to it,” B’Elanna snapped. “I don’t need you here today.”
He’d long grown used to her temper, but the black look she threw him almost made Harry flinch. The things it seemed to imply. “Is it... because I miscalculated? Because my corrections—”
“We tried, we failed,” B’Elanna stopped him, and a tight breath settled her shoulders. “It wasn’t just you, Harry. Everyone involved in this project wanted to see it happen, and they all took the risk.”
“Only my solution—” He broke off when the tart irony of it lashed back at him. “What I proposed only made things worse.”
“We were all working under pressure,” B’Elanna returned in gruff tones. “I thought it was a great idea. And what did we lose? The technology has a lot of potential, although we might not be able to develop it any further in the Delta Quadrant.”
“Then I don’t understand,” he tried again. “Why you don’t want my help.”
“Look, no one’s happy today.” B’Elanna turned back to her console and stabbed at the central screen. “Tell you what. Why don’t you use the simulation to check up on your phase corrections, see if you can track down the reason why they didn’t work. Consider it an official assignment, if you like. Or shall I make it an order?”
Harry pulled himself upright, stung by her tone, her unrelenting resolve to shut him out. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Good,” she answered without looking at him. “Out of my office, Starfleet. I’ll expect your results at the end of shift.”
There were reasons, Harry told himself on his way to Deck Four, why she’d acted as if they were crewmates thrown together by force of necessity, not friends. Reasons on the human level that had nothing to do with temporal instabilities. And Chakotay’s disclosure confirmed that some of his troubling memories were grounded within present reality. But he felt less than reassurred, less at home in his own skin than he remembered feeling since — Akritiri, perhaps. When the holodeck doors closed behind him, when he walked around a simulation of the bridge where no one else kept watch, it fit right in with his mood.
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52145.5
When your only reality is an illusion, then illusion is reality, he’d been told once. It was one way of looking at things, and no longer quite so disturbing as he’d thought at the time. But Harry still couldn’t bring himself to adopt that point of view and abandon the need to know. He used the master systems screen and its flanking consoles at the back of the simulated bridge to run through all the data they’d compiled before the slipstream flight and after. Comparing patterns, matching the phase variance against the corrections he’d sent back to Voyager — from the present and the future.
The results, if he’d merged them all into a single picture, would have resembled a cluster of interlacing manifolds. Too many facets to imprint on the mind, made up from a staggering number of variables — and even a minor change affecting a single factor would turn it into a hyperdimensional puzzle he could push around for the next few years. Harry nudged his seat back for a better view of the datastreams scrolling across several displays. He only had a day to fit the pieces together, even discarding factors that defied calculation. Things like subjective experience, or a vanished future.
Simplify. Harry rubbed his thumbs back and forth over the edge of the console. Three elements to connect, to figure into a proper equation. The distortion, the slipstream, and the fact that the course of the future had been irrevocably altered. Time was the common thread, the only lead he could follow.
And he was already at it, tapping out commands that rearranged the dataflow, highlighting key figures against those interweaving digital threads. A pattern was beginning to emerge when a faint hiss made him look up.
The wall segment beside Tactical split, dispersed the illusion, and exposed the holodeck arch. Tom strode in, spotting him at first glance. Harry pushed his seat back.
“Lunch,” Tom said, tossing him a wrapped sandwich. “You skipped breakfast.”
Harry didn’t ask how he knew. “Is it that late already?”
Tom’s presence overwhelmed him with a feeling he’d always kept at the very back of his mind, passing it through carefully modulated filters, but he couldn’t seem to do that anymore. As if his awareness had been sharpened to every move Tom made, a little edgy but determined, as he pulled up a seat for himself and dropped down on it.
“Thanks.” Harry tugged at the wrappers and couldn’t trace a seam anywhere. He was glad to see Tom, too glad perhaps, even though their exchange last night seemed like a knot he couldn’t possibly untie into easy conversation.
Tom reached for the sandwich, unwrapped it for him, and handed it back. “I owe you an apology,” he said, all matter of fact. “For the way I acted last night. Like a steam truck.” His mouth quirked with the mere semblance of a smile. “Exactly what you needed.”
“It’s alright.”
Tom returned an exasperated look. “Stop that. Stop letting me take advantage of you.”
“No, really,” Harry insisted. “I was... confused is too mild a way of putting it. Shell-shocked, maybe.”
He bit into the sandwich without pausing to identify Neelix’s far-fetched flavor of the day, and tried to focus on the master screen. Yet none of this was real. Just a conglemerate of photons and force fields that the holodeck’s emitters arranged into recognizable shape, and he could feel Tom watching him from the side. Waiting, perhaps, for an answer that was long overdue. A slow heat flushed his chest. When he looked up, Tom’s glance swerved aside again.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
Harry shook his head. “What wasn’t?”
“Me, coming on to you as if it’s no big deal. You know.”
But he didn’t. And it didn’t help that his breath and heartbeat doubled their rate, blanking the better part of his mind. Here they were sitting side by side, both of them staring ahead at the displays — a perfectly ordinary scene, to any casual observer — and something like polarized energy charged the air between them. Harry swallowed the last bite of his sandwich before he made himself ask, “So it is a big deal?”
“You could say that,” Tom replied in all sobriety, then lifted an eyebrow and twisted his mouth into a lopsided grin. “But, as they say, there’s a right time for everything. Now probably isn’t.”
“I could use some help here,” Harry answered, his voice tight as if something were stuck in his throat.
He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d meant by that, but Tom focused on the systems display at once. “Sure. If you can bear with a pilot’s simple-minded view of things.”
“Simple would be great.” Harry swallowed again and waved a hand at the figures. “I’ve got this notion that it’s all interconnected...”
Interlaced in an endless knot might have been the better description, but Tom had offered him a chance to move it all back to familiar grounds, and he took it, with a sensation nearing relief. A chance to return to the hard grid of reason and not wonder what they were waiting for, or why. His pulse took a little longer to settle.
He didn’t look at Tom when he started from the beginning. With his experience of double vision and displacement — and before everything snapped back into place, there’d been two realities, sliding apart. An overlap that tied in directly with temporal paradox.
“There must have been a brief moment when we... coexisted,” he explained. “Me and my future self. An overlap between times, caused by a delay in the transmission. Otherwise it would have collapsed before the phase corrections could reach Seven. That’s how he got the message through. And I’m guessing that’s what caused the distortion, too.”
Tom lifted his shoulders. “Frankly, that sounds pretty mystical to me. Maybe you should take it up with Chakotay. Or Tuvok.”
“There’s nothing mystical involved,” Harry insisted. “It’s all connected to the slipstream. It manipulates the fabric of spacetime and could have acted as a conduit.”
“A conduit for what?”
“For a temporal disturbance. It all started when the slipstream engaged for the first time. And when you ran the diagnostic the following day—”
“I discovered the phase variance, right,” Tom finished with a frown. “You think the two events are related? How?”
“I’m not even sure we’ve got enough data to figure that out, exactly.” Harry shrugged at the daunting mass on the display. “But remember the time problem we came up against when we ran the slipstream simulation? How we could never close the gap between threshold formation and calculating the phase corrections. Flying the Delta Flyer ahead of Voyager didn’t fix that. Look at the fluctuations here...” He keyed for a magnified view and tapped the screen. “There’s a temporal factor involved that keeps shifting.”
Tom studied the figures with a look of growing discomfort. They might not be conclusive, but they all pointed in a single direction.
“I think the distortion reflected something,” Harry continued. “The temporal incursion, the moment when time was changed. Kind of like... a shockwave running back through time.”
Tom regarded him for a long moment. “And that’s why no one else felt it?”
“It wasn’t just me. Chakotay noticed something like it, only fainter — apparently.” Harry pressed his lips together and breathed in again before he could say it. “The only other survivor.” A chill formed at the back of his neck, tracing an inevitable conclusion that he hadn’t been able to see before.
And when Tom glanced back at him, his eyes reflected a similar disturbance, something he wanted to deny by instinct. “Wait a minute. You’re saying, what, that your interference from the future may have caused the phase variance that you came back to fix in the first place? That’s—”
“A causality loop.” It came out sounding dead and dry, like defeat.
“Impossible, I was going to say.” Tom tapped his knuckles against his lower lip. Determined to resist the full weight of reason, as he so often did. “Because in that case, there’s no way you could have corrected your initial error. If the two things are mutually dependent, then you’d just keep bouncing back and forth between them, right? Correct the original variance, everything goes haywire, come back to fix that, and you’re causing another slip—” He kicked his seat back from the console. “Perfect formula for a headache. Still. That’s not what happened.”
“No, but the point is, I — he didn’t fix the initial mistake.” Harry paused. The chill returned, winding its way into his gut. “He had fifteen years to do it. And it still didn’t work.”
“But we survived,” Tom argued, “Voyager didn’t — oh.” He held up a hand. “We made it out of the slipstream, but not into the Alpha Quadrant. So shutting down the drive was an emergency solution?” A smile tried to take shape, reaching for confidence. “Looks like you found a loophole after all.”
“I’m pretty sure I can’t take any credit for that, nor my counterpart in the future.” Not even that. Harry tried to keep his voice stable and suspected failure. “It would never occur to me to look for a completely different solution. I would have tried to fix the error and come up with the proper phase corrections. To send Voyager home.”
“That sounds like you,” Tom said grudgingly. “But, look, assuming you’re right about all this, we’re no longer stuck within the loop. What was it that the captain said when we got trapped in that singularity? Sometimes you just have to punch your way through.”
“Yes, but there’s usually a price to pay.” In one abrupt movement, Harry got to his feet and turned about, to stare across the silent bridge. Facing the main viewscreen, where the slipstream visuals eddied about an empty center.
“That overlap of incompatible times,” he said. “It suspended the sequence of cause and effect. That doesn’t just happen without doing any harm.”
“That’s what you meant last night? A changed timeline?”
Harry closed his eyes. “Fractured continuity, multiple timelines... I don’t know.”
“Well, whatever it caused, and even if it damaged the continuum somehow, it’s done. And we’re still here.”
He could hear the flat resolve in Tom’s voice, meeting realities with a rebellious kind of pragmatism, but alarm twisted everything inside him. He tensed up against it, against the knowledge that closed in hard, taking his breath.
“Without the message, we wouldn’t even know. Now what am I supposed to do?”
His voice had lowered to a rough murmur and floated back to him with an edge of dread. He’d trapped himself in a causal loop until something — or someone — had to break him free. Not me. His mirror self from the future hadn’t worn that haunted look for nothing.
What is it that I owe you?
“What can you do?” Tom’s voice reached him from a different angle, close by his side. “Think about it, Harry. There’s no hard evidence for any of this. When all’s said and done, it’s really just speculation. A theory, nothing more.”
“And we can’t tell anyone.” Harry turned towards him, taking a small measure of relief from Tom’s presence and the demands of abstract rules. “Part of the Temporal Prime Directive. Knowledge from the future amounts to a paradox that can affect the timeline.”
“Oh, I’ll be glad to keep it to myself.” Tom’s expression showed that he couldn’t care less about regulations and temporal convolutions right now. “But will that make it any better?”
Obvious as the answer was, Harry offered a shrug in silent apology. “He sent me that message to show me what I’d done and remember. And I have to.”
“Kinda cruel to drop that in your lap!” Tom blew out a sigh. “But, you know what? It’s entirely like you, to be that hard on yourself.”
“I’m not.” It was a simple matter of equivalence, so simple Harry could’ve turned it into algebra.
“Sure you are.” Tom wrapped both hands around the handrail, gripping hard. “If you make a mistake and things go wrong, you won’t let it go for a long, long time. Don’t forget, I was part of it too. I encouraged you to pursue your idea and use the Delta Flyer.”
“It was my responsibility, not yours,” Harry shot back. He couldn’t believe they were arguing about this, but it pushed him further out to the crumbling edge of reason.
“Yeah, well, you’ve always made exceptions for me,” Tom said sharply. “For the mistakes I make.” His mouth thinned. All that tense, brittle energy was gathering force just beneath the surface.
“Tom... look, I can’t go on as if nothing happened!”
His tone was too defensive, dragging out into the pause that followed.
“Wanna know something?” Tom pushed away from the handrail and picked up momentum in one smooth motion. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to be alive. But if I had any say in it, I wouldn’t want you to come back for me. Fifteen years!” More than disbelief thickened his voice, there was anger in it, too. “God, Harry, I’d want you to live.”
“How can you say that?”
Something inside him strained hard enough to snap. And it was just like Tom, to change the rules instead of tackling paradox. Instead of facing the sharp edges, the fractures Harry could have mapped out blind, because they ran right through him. He looked at Tom, desperately waiting for an answer that took long to come.
Sometimes, when Tom was exhausted beyond relief, his eyes had that overbright shine, all the color washed out to a near-transparent blue. Like they did at this moment, when he raised his arms and said, “C’mere, Harry, right now.”
He needed a hold within reality more than anything. Whatever moved him forward had nothing to do with calculations and caution and was fast detaching from thought altogether. Just that. He needed a hold.
When Tom’s arms closed around him, folding over his back with more restraint than he’d expected, he could feel the tight breaths and rushed heartbeats that were all his own, reflected through that close circle. Absorbed, gradually, as a different rhythm surrounded him, the rise and fall of Tom’s chest in half-light, half-darkness. He leaned in until the taut muscles eased a little under his hands, and Tom lowered his head, his breath stirring warmth across the back of Harry’s neck, stirring through his hair. The rhythm was changing now, bearing him up, pulling him closer. Just stay here. Here.
A shiver traveled up his chest, more than relief, like a change of direction that moved in through his skin when Tom’s fingers drew a gentle search pattern across his shoulder blade. And it was hard to drag himself away, if only by an inch or two, to focus on the blind spot that kept eluding him.
“There’s something I need to know.” Another leap of pressure roughened his voice. “It’s — my own memory. I’m just not sure anymore.” He looked up to meet Tom’s eyes. “Before we launched the Delta Flyer. At first I didn’t seem to remember at all, and then—”
Tom’s glance hardened before it flew past him, out towards a vague distance. Perhaps that was an answer in itself.
“Were you there?” Harry asked all the same.
About ready to let go, Tom held him at arm’s length. “You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not a matter of wanting, Tom.”
He gave everything away with that reply and didn’t care.
“It’s not?”
“Hasn’t been for two years. Give or take a few weeks.”
“Two years, Harry?” Tom’s voice softened, strained by a harsh breath. “What’re you saying?”
His hands were clasped tightly around Tom’s arms, and he didn’t think he should have to explain, when a low background hiss resolved the matter. The doors activated. But Tom’s eyes still captured him, their color and heat returning, and it slowed his reactions because he’d laid himself wide open. By the time his hands dropped and they stepped apart, the holodeck arch was fading from view behind B’Elanna.
The sight of them had broken her momentum, but not for long. “Tom,” she said curtly. “What’re you doing here?”
“Lunch break.” Tom summoned a look that was all nonchalance and gestured towards the displays. “Helping out.”
“I’m sure you’ll get extra points for not wasting any time.” B’Elanna crossed her arms, her impatience as visible as leashed energy inside a plasma conduit. “I think your lunch break’s over, Lieutenant.”
Only a few days ago, her attitude might have led to another sparring match. Now Tom ran his fingers through his hair and shrugged uneasily. His glance passed from her back to Harry, bristling with questions.
Harry dipped his head. Impossible to leave things like this, suspended between disbelief, half-formed possibilities, and circumstance slamming down hard — yet now wasn’t the time.
“Alright,” Tom relented with another shrug. “I’ll see you later.”
It was only when the doors closed behind him that Harry realized his own question hadn’t been answered, not strictly, though it didn’t seem to matter anymore. The real answer was as far removed from yes or no as the bridge simulation from the hologrid beneath. And it seized him even now, in a rush going out with his breath.
“B’Elanna.” As he turned towards her, he braced for something inevitable. A fight or a falling-out, quite likely more than he could handle if it turned out that, no matter what Tom thought, she wasn’t through with him.
“Funny,” B’Elanna said in a tone that held no trace of amusement, “I came here to say I’m sorry for being so abrupt with you this morning.”
“There’s no need,” Harry told her. She had no tolerance for anything that resembled beating around the bush, so he didn’t try. “But when you got here, look, B’Elanna, we weren’t—”
“Spare me that, Starfleet.” She whipped across the holographic bridge as if she’d been ordered in for an emergency overhaul. “It’s none of my business anyway.”
Harry thought better of following her around. “You’re not reacting as if it wasn’t.”
She gave a sharp, dry laugh. “No, you’re right. What do you expect from a Half-Klingon? Pride is everything.”
Harry waited until she’d completed her circle and met his eyes again. “I’m your friend. I’d never—”
“Well, you’re his friend first, let’s be straightforward about this.” B’Elanna tipped her head back. Her glance offered no concessions. “I suppose you’ve heard the news meanwhile. He told you, didn’t he?”
“Last night. He said you’d... reached an agreement.”
“Yes, finally.” Her teeth flashed in imitation of a sarcastic smile. “Sometimes the only honorable thing to do is to give up. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
More often than not, B’Elanna flared her grievance like a shield to keep hurt and disappointment well covered. Harry could trace it in the hard set of her jaw, all the painful tension that signaled something unresolved. And he owed her — if not the reassurance he couldn’t give, then at least an effort to take her side. A clear-headed look at the situation that discounted his own position.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve had a fight,” he said finally.
“It’s the first time we really faced up to the truth.” B’Elanna pulled up her shoulders, arms still folded before her chest as she stared across at the conn. “Don’t get me wrong,” she added in a different tone. “And don’t let me take it out on you. I’m angry and upset because I couldn’t make it work. You know me, I hate failure.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Tom,” she said bluntly and met Harry’s eyes only for a moment, refusing sympathy. “But he’s right. It’s better to walk away at some point, when the damage is still within tolerance.”
“How can you tell?” Harry countered. “It’s not like recalibrating the warp field.”
“Harry, stop it.” Her shoulders settled, slowly releasing tension and resistance. “I know you mean well, but... just stop it, okay? It’s over, for good reason.” B’Elanna faced him now, her eyes less clouded than before. “You know what it was like. You were there the whole time. Hell, you were part of it.”
The force behind that last statement struck up a blank in his head, but Harry could feel a balance shift as B’Elanna advanced on him, resolutely turning the tables.
“I’m not blind, Harry.”
It took his breath away, that she might have known all along, and the safeguards he’d constructed with no one but Tom in mind could be swept aside like this. “I wasn’t going to,” he started and faltered again immediately. “I never meant to... interfere.”
“You didn’t.” B’Elanna made it sound almost like a reproach. “And there’s nothing you could have done. Short of beaming yourself out into space.”
Harry shook his head in reflex as he tried to absorb what she seemed to be saying. A reeling change played itself out in slow motion. Heat crawled into his face, but B’Elanna hadn’t finished yet.
“He said you’ll be better without me. Yes, highly original. And you know what?” She stepped up close, pushing him towards a changed reality with impatient force. “I think he’s better with you.”
“You don’t mean that,” Harry answered without thinking, although he wasn’t sure what exactly she’d meant.
B’Elanna snorted. “What, you don’t want him anymore?”
His face must be flaming by now, Harry knew and couldn’t help it.
“Oh. You do. But—?” B’Elanna studied him a moment longer. “Well, it’s your decision.” She touched his arm and brought his eyes back to hers with that. “Just don’t ask for my blessing. I’m not in the mood for that kind of thing today.”
Her tone was caustic again, but her expression offered reconciliation somewhere down the line. With a brisk motion, she turned back towards the master systems screen.
Harry joined her at a slower pace and cleared his throat. “B’Elanna... thank you.”
“Whatever.” She waved him off with a small, tight-lipped smile, but her eyes glittered. “Now. Show me what you’ve got. What’s the trouble with those phase corrections?”
∞ ∞ ∞
U.S.S. VOYAGER: STARDATE 52145.7
Time had changed its course and meaning. Back in his quarters, Harry skimmed the files he’d downloaded from Voyager’s library in the morning, and found nothing in the cool language of mathematics that could contain or balance such a fathomless change. It was no longer a matter of analyzing calculation errors anyway.
After they’d reviewed all the data together, B’Elanna had agreed that the temporal fluctuation made reliable mapping of the slipstream threshold impossible. Beyond that, he’d told her nothing. She’d been reassured, though, to find out that the dangerous flaw went well beyond her design and into areas that defied safe testing. Once she’d incorporated that into her report, there’d be no more experiments with the slipstream drive. Even now it was becoming history, a dwindling point within the web of time that had never seemed so fragile before.
Harry sat unmoving in a spill of light shed by a single overhead panel, the rest of his quarters in ship’s darkness. God, Tom, what am I gonna do?
Out of joint with his thinking, recollection moved through him — smooth one moment and jarring the next — and kept bursting to the surface. The slight brush of fabric against his chest when he breathed in was enough, and memory dispersed into sensation, into want. He could feel Tom’s arms around him, Tom’s breath against his neck, closer than he had at the time, until something inside him turned over, towards a single light-source. But he couldn’t align with this need to move forward, or move at all. His only response, at present, was to hold himself rigidly still.
A new timeline had displaced the old one. Reality had fractured, and the chinks might be closing, yet from a certain angle they were still visible, a glare like hard radiation seeping through.
If he was right about the causal loop, then all events since the original distortion, since they’d first tested the slipstream drive, were questionable. Things that might not — or should not — have happened, without the interference of his future self. And, in the stark logic of temporal mechanics, nothing at all could be done about it. Any attempt to correct the deviation from the proper timeline was bound to make the damage worse — and how would he know the right future anyway, a future no one recalled?
The paradox had taken up residence inside him now. Awareness of incalulable damage, somewhere in the continuum, that he couldn’t identify or locate, let alone fix. Knowledge of a discontinuity he couldn’t feel, because for him as for everyone else aboard Voyager, time had simply moved forward in an unbroken flow.
But from here, every decision would take him further out across time — which resembled nothing so much as a thin crust of ice, while the fissures spread and intersected at each step. Wrong or right, there was no way to tell. The fright of it still ripped through his stomach, in all likelihood no more than he deserved. And from the same source burned disbelief when he let himself think of Tom. A thought that equaled physical impact, his heart pounding in his chest.
He was stretched out between these two states, love and fear, and it seemed like the sum of the past four years, two months, twelve days, laid out to inspection at breaking point.
Something would have to give.
Harry leaned forward to switch off his console and complete the silence, when his glance caught on a heading in the file index. Timeless. A state that didn’t exist. Inside the same breath, he caught himself thinking, if only.
When he opened the file, it didn’t belong with the sheaf of papers from scientific journals, it was part of the latest Federation bulletin uploaded to Voyager’s databanks at Deep Space Nine, just before their departure into the Badlands. An interview, the lead-in specified, with the survivor of an interstellar accident in 2370. A colony ship passing too close to a protonebula had apparently fallen victim to a temporal anomaly. In keeping with this type of human interest story, the facts had been pared down to serve as mere garnish for the embedded vid. No details on the nature of the temporal anomaly, and no coordinates either. Yet the ship, presumably destroyed, had simply vanished from Federation sensors, and search parties had failed to turn up conclusive evidence.
Traceless, Harry thought, might have been the better heading for this story, though not as intriguing as Timeless. He shifted the vid to the screen’s center all the same. Out of seven hundred forty-eight crew and passengers, five had escaped the disaster, and only the youngest among them — Tessa Omond, aged nineteen, ran the caption — had been willing to discuss it.
The frozen image showed her tall and skinny, her posture revealing traces of gangly adolescence, dark hair in sharp contrast with her skin tone. When Harry started the vid, he expected her to blink or move, but she listened in perfect quiet as the interviewer — no more than a glib female voice kept resolutely outside the frame — recounted the tragic events.
At the time of the accident, Tessa had been visiting the ship’s labs apart from her family, and when a first hull breach triggered evacuation alert, she’d been jostled into the nearest escape pod. Discovering much later that only a single pod had been launched, and that she’d lost her entire family — two sisters and a brother beside her parents — to a single strike of random negativity.
Lost, the interviewer said, with a prepackaged kindness that cloaked the truth, but Tessa objected instantly.
No trace of the ship was ever found, so they might be dead, or they might not be.
She stated that with a brilliant smile, so much pain behind it that Harry’s throat grew tight.
I have to live with that. Equal probabilities.
A challenge, her expression said, not a cause for despair.
My dad’s an archaeologist, and he made me see long ago that we merely think of time as linear, although it isn’t, not really. A single find from the past can overturn the history that’s already been written, and change the present — do you see what I’m saying?
This was a year after the accident. Repeated rounds of counseling, Harry guessed, had sharpened her responses. When the faceless interviewer inquired about her forced departure from the damaged ship, lowering her voice to signal sympathy, Tessa refused the bait.
It was actually very peaceful. I kept looking out through the one small porthole, at the stars within the nebula, that endless gauze of lights. We didn’t know what had happened, what was going to happen, we were simply adrift. On the outside.
But then, afterwards? The shock, recognition. The point of this interview, Harry supposed, was to tease out an emotional drama, and it made his skin crawl. Tessa frowned.
Oh, I miss them very much, but what gets difficult is the memory. Have you ever watched a juggler keeping his balls in the air — say, a dozen of them — and play havoc with gravity? It’s touch and let go, again and again. You can’t afford to drop a single one, but you can’t hold on too hard, either. She leaned forward, searching for recognition in the face outside the frame. All those memories that I carry, there’s very little room left for anything but the present.
The interviewer gave a meaningful little cough, common sense getting ready for protest. Tessa must have been exposed to it time and again. When she tipped her chin up, her features hardened beyond her years, and for a moment she reminded Harry very much of Captain Janeway.
But that’s how I carry them into the present, do you see? And I have to. Love exists in a continuum apart from time. It doesn’t play by the same rules.
And so I won’t. She settled back. Ever.
The finality of her statement was shocking. Compelling, too, with a fearless intensity that qualified as over-the-edge irresponsible, within the realm of common sense.
Harry closed the file, gripped by something close to alarm, close to deliverance. Like an accidental mirror, Tessa’s loss reflected his own in a vanished timeline. Had he thought of Tom like this in the future, filling himself with memories to keep him present — is that what I’d do? — and even though he could only speculate, it ran through him now, like live current. All the memories that he’d want to hold close.
Absurd, when Tom was alive and aboard the same ship, just two decks above. But it made Harry see, with exacting clarity, just how he’d trapped himself.
He turned off the console and glanced across his quarters. As if he might spot a shadow of himself, wrapped around the secret that wasn’t one anymore. B’Elanna knew, she must have caught some of his stolen glances, some of his unguarded moments that came late at night, after grueling shifts or touch-and-go incidents. And Tom —
The notion that Tom might still want him unsettled every thought and feeling that surrounded him in Harry’s mind, all of them based on the single assumption that he’d missed his one chance. And there’d never be another one. Not until reality was taken apart and assembled anew, as it just had been.
The first thing he thought was, I’m such a fool, the next — well, that was harder to push into coherent thinking, it felt more like a lightburst that went through his middle.
By the time he arrived at Tom’s quarters, he was so nervous that he couldn’t be sure he’d get a word out, never mind the right words, or what exactly they’d unlock. Only when he paused in front of Tom’s door did it occur to him that he hadn’t asked the computer to confirm Tom’s location either. Tom’s shift had ended a good hour before, and he might be anywhere on the ship, perhaps resuming his off-duty routines at Sandrine’s to unwind.
Nothing like trying. Harry ran his fingers through his hair. He was out of uniform, as if getting changed might set him in a different mode, and he’d come here following blind instinct. When he pressed the door-chime, his heartbeat doubled its pace again.
“Come on in.” Tom must have stepped from the shower only minutes before. He was barefoot, in the process of pulling a loose sweater over his head, which left his hair sticking out at his temples. “Oh. It’s you.”
His tone made it a question, yet the cedar-spiced scent of his soap reached Harry sooner than that. Only a trace of it, and he caught himself imagining the warmth of flushed, damp skin beneath the loose neck of Tom’s sweater. If this had been a brand new discovery, perhaps things would have been easier. But there were years between them, separating them as much as they formed a solid connection. Harry curled up his fingers around an imagined touch.
“I wanted to be here sooner,” he said, offering a piece of the tangled truth. He’d never expected any single declaration to snap everything into place. Perhaps the trouble was that he’d shaped no expectations at all.
Tom’s appraising glance took note of his hesitation, the way he’d paused just a few steps into the room. “Still in the wrong timeline, Harry?”
He shook his head, although the full answer was more complicated. But Tom had the mind of a pilot — the best pilot far and away — always completely immersed in the present, every reflex matched to an assignment that matched his love for speed in turn. For challenges that reduced the complexity of any situation to split-second choices. And he always stuck to the choices he’d reached like that.
“Wrong or right, there’s only one timeline,” Harry began his answer. “Our minds are configured that way. The rest... the rest is just ifs and maybes.” Putting it like this cut against the grain of his usual thinking, and Tom must have noticed that too.
“Right.” His mouth twitched with a start of relief. “We’ve had too many of those lately. What with this whole going-home business and tying up all the loose ends.” He sent a strained half-grin after that notion. “Or failing to tie them up, as the case may be.”
“Mostly that,” Harry agreed. His mind flew back to the conversation they’d had the night before, dipping through its different layers to pick out the broken edges. “When the Delta Flyer crashed. You didn’t record... a goodbye message for me.”
It was less than a question, and his voice grew tight with it. Yes, it hurt, inconsequential what-if that it was, it hurt to think that Tom would have left him with nothing. Only that final, abrupt silence, cutting close to his deepest fear.
Tom’s face twisted as if he’d taken a blow.
“Couldn’t,” he said abrasively.
“But—” Harry’s breath faltered because he’d been thrown an answer that went beyond anything Tom could have explained. It slipped through the gaps and showed him desolation at the back of Tom’s glance, casting a long, hard shadow.
“You didn’t know how to put an end to it?” Harry guessed. “Didn’t want to call it anything — definite?”
If it hadn’t been for the pained surprise that’d cut off his breath, he’d never have said that. He really had no right at all to call Tom out on his failings when his own were so much worse.
“You know me, I’m irresponsible. Unfinished business all over the place.” Tom’s defiance returned with the usual touch of sarcasm. “Like — well, this.” He gestured, as if letting something fly out of his hand, and Harry was startled to realize, with delay, how nervous Tom was. A muscle jumped in his cheek. “Harry. Why are you here?”
“I came across something in the library files, and it hit me hard.” He almost winced when he realized how that sounded, as if he’d been brought here by accident. “Something concerning... time, memory. Dealing with loss.”
“Time.” Tom watched him intently, cool speculation mixed with something else. “As in, time wasted?”
“That, too,” Harry said, his voice growing husky from the pressure of all the things he still needed to say and couldn’t find words for.
“Maybe I should let you borrow one of my favorite books.” Tom tipped his head towards the shelf. “Moby Dick. Didn’t see it when I first read it, but the point got through to me later. Okay, much later.”
So what was it? But the question slipped from Harry’s mind, because there was something about Tom now, something that glittered diamond-hard, with sharp edges — and while those might have been carved by savage circumstance, the radiance was all his own. Catching alight unpredictably. And Tom answered him anyway.
“Your failures are bound to eat you alive, if you can’t let them go.” He paused, and his tone changed, pushing for a resolution of some sort as he moved within arm’s reach. “You need to, you know.”
“Let go?” Harry braced himself, but his voice had already started to crack.
Tom gave a small nod. “It’s been almost four years since you told me you weren’t ready, and guess what? You had it right. I wasn’t either, just didn’t want to see it. My timing was off.”
A soft note of defeat had crept into his voice, so unfamiliar that it started a small, cramping ache under Harry’s breastbone.
“And now you tell me it’s been, what, two years?” Tom reached out, brushing his knuckles against the side of Harry’s face, and let his hand drop again fast. “And you never said a word. Never gave me a chance. Whatever you’ve been holding on to, it wasn’t me.”
Protest surged forward almost before Harry could think, but his chest felt drained and hollow, and not for lack of breath. Tom had just dropped all his defenses, forcing him to wonder if this was true, if they’d lost too much time. Too much to ever make up for.
“I want the real thing,” Tom said. “Or nothing.”
Harry took one glance at his face, at the fierce show of determination that made Tom look so very vulnerable, and it stabbed through him in a single flare that went back to the beginning. Folding back the years to a time when Tom had slowly lowered his guard, let him see past the smoke-screens he put up so easily, to the scars underneath, the cost of survival. Exposing something so raw that it got under Harry’s skin before he half knew, because it was rare and incredibly precious, and it filled him with a painful tenderness he’d left unnamed for the longest time. Whatever Tom trusted him with, he wanted to enfold and keep safe. But Akritiri had taught him a brutal lesson about that. He was falling in love — still unaware, but definitely falling — and the only choice he’d got left in the end was not to survive without Tom. Keeping it all locked within, afterwards, had been the only manner of safety he still knew.
“You’re right,” he said with difficulty, “I just keep holding on. Scared of losing myself. Of all the changes, and never making it back home till I’ve changed so much, it won’t matter anymore.”
He could feel Tom’s eyes on him, but more than that, all the things Tom’s presence did to him, starting with an electric flutter in his stomach and radiating out from there. For too long, he’d approached this feeling like a flawed equation in need of revisions.
“There’s more,” Harry went on. “Losing you. Out here—” He broke off, with a very real sense of the vastness outside, incalculable reaches of vacuum, of time. “Anything can happen. In a day, an hour. And you’ll be gone.” He only needed to say it out loud to feel how afraid he’d been, like ragged bits of lightning caught up in his gut. “And I’ll be left with nothing but memories anyway.”
“Something to take home with you,” Tom said, lightly mocking. To draw him out, Harry could tell, since that was what Tom did all the time. Draw him out to the dwindling line between fear and unexpected thrills, until the difference blurred.
“Tom... I’m still afraid, but.”
With one quick step, Harry closed the distance between them. Nothing was settled here, perhaps nothing could settle this, and he’d never retrieve the strained truce that he’d kept with his own feelings either. But a slow burn worked its way through him now. The need to break free, break himself out of a holding pattern he’d installed for security reasons, a goddamn illusion.
“If I had to choose between going home and... you.” He’d never forced himself up against that blunt alternative before, and it drove a wedge between the past and the future. His hands closed around Tom’s arms by the same momentum, a haphazard grip for something real. “There’s no choice, Tom. I just never thought I had one.”
“Now you tell me.” Tom let a long breath escape, and it washed against Harry’s face like surrender. He leaned no closer though, only his fingers curled around Harry’s neck — and this halting touch signaled that Tom was waiting, undecided, leaving the next move to him.
“I want—”
The rest of it escaped words, escaped him, too much all at once. He wasn’t used to making forceful statements like this, and the tension that slipped into the tight space between them looped around his thoughts and made his pulse stumble. It had to show in his face, too, something raw and imbalanced that’d never been part of the truce, because he couldn’t have fastened it down for the life of him.
“Yes, Harry,” Tom said with the lightest quizzical inflection, and his own answer hovered just out of reach.
Oh god, he thought, while part of it struggled up his throat in a shapeless murmur. But he’d already lifted his hand and traced Tom’s face at his fingertips, the way he’d sometimes imagined that he would, matching every line, curve and plane against visual memory, only to find everything infinitely different, changed. The warmth of Tom’s skin, the soft crinkles at the corner of his eye, the way his lips parted on an abrupt breath.
Once he’d started, Harry couldn’t make himself stop anymore. It felt like coming out of stasis, the way his nerves prickled, as if time had congealed around him ever since he’d received that message, and now something eased surreptitiously, unfolding at a touch. He went about it with thorough attention, taking every touch into himself, each a small shockpulse that loosened the hold of years.
Until Tom lowered his glance and caught Harry’s hand in his own. “I think I know what you’re saying, but...” He brushed his mouth against Harry’s palm, a hot shiver of air more than touch. “Would you mind saying it?”
Harry shook his head. “What, that—” He breathed out. “That I love you.”
“Yeah, that.” Tom’s smile came with a slow start and burst into joy midway, so close and dazzling it made Harry’s throat burn. Because this was what he’d dreamed to see at their homecoming, turned away from him, not towards him.
“Oh, but—” He had to start over when his voice turned to gravel, “it’s true, I just — I didn’t. I love you, Tom. I should’ve told you before.”
So many times, over and over, instead of letting it slide into silence. And he wanted to keep saying it when it brought such a high gleam to Tom’s eyes, like something from the edge of a summer sky. It made him feel how that lonely girl — Tessa — must have felt, watching the nebula full of stars from an escape pod. Awed by a sight so beautiful and unknowable.
Tom slipped an arm around his waist and caught him close. “What’s wrong with now?”
He didn’t need to answer that when his heartbeat picked up and drummed through him so hard that Tom must be able to feel it. How it filled him up with wishing and wanting and twisted his stomach into knots.
When Tom kissed him, he remembered and yet he didn’t, because it flared through him so new and wanton that drawing on memory wasn’t an option anymore, it was nothing but breath and warmth and a slow building swell in every nerve. It was full of Tom’s own intensity, tenderness and impatience wrapped together in the pressure of lips and tongue and the long shiver that trailed down Harry’s back. Slowly pulling the ground out from under his feet. He broke away with a startled gasp, and the room steadied around them like an afterthought.
“I just never. Never thought you could.”
“What, Harry?” Tom’s hold on him tightened subtly. “Want you? I kinda thought I’d established that back at the beginning.” His fingers splayed over the small of Harry’s back, a familiar touch changing course and meaning. “Love you? And why ever not?”
He had no answer, not when Tom laid himself bare like this — to the point where he could be hurt — and it still tightened Harry’s insides with something close to alarm.
“It wasn’t all that hard,” Tom said. “See, I came aboard not prepared to trust anyone. Bad habit, I guess, but it served me well enough for years. And here, within days, I found myself trusting you.” He paused for the twitch of a shrug. “Maybe that’s why I... tried to rush things. Back then, that was the only way I could operate. Grab all you can get, because it’s not gonna last. Nothing does.”
The longer he went on, the more Harry could feel his agitation rise, in a hot flush. “So... you do?”
“I. Yeah. Very much.” Tom breathed in sharply. “You were there when everybody else took one look at me and saw nothing but the dirty footprints of a life gone wrong.”
“And that’s enough?” Harry asked. His head felt light. “Just that I was... there?”
“That’s plenty,” Tom answered, his voice tight with conviction. “And there’s more, but — just try to believe me, okay?”
Perhaps that was the hardest part, when he’d spent so much time discounting possibilities, not holding out for a chance but making himself not wait and not want. I’m sorry, he wanted to say, but a scalding ache rose up from his throat to the back of his eyes. He tried to blink it aside.
Tom cupped his hands around his face, something so serious in his eyes that Harry couldn’t recall seeing more than once or twice. “That’s not quite the reaction I was hoping for.”
“I will,” Harry managed, “I want to.”
“So what’s to be afraid of?” Tom asked, very quietly.
“It’s.” An old snare, really, that he’d tangled with time and again. “That I’ll end up wanting too much.” And too much always bordered on nothing.
“Try me,” Tom said with the ghost of a smile. “Trust me, Harry.”
Stepping out through an airlock, into the sudden loss of gravity had to feel something like this, and before he quite knew he’d wrapped Tom in a fierce embrace, his face buried at the side of Tom’s neck where a hurried pulse brushed his lips, running quick and deep like the want that tore through him, brighter than before. He was breathing Tom’s scent, underneath the cedar tang of his soap, and it made his eyes fill and burn again.
“Tom...” Barely a sound, shaped against Tom’s neck, as he pressed himself against the full length of his body. Until his heart clenched with the love he’d never really permitted himself to feel either.
“God, Harry, I can’t breathe!” But Tom was laughing, quick shallow jolts moving through his chest, and his fingers strayed from Harry’s temples into his hair, across his neck, stirring another shiver down his spine.
And the laughter was catching, it kicked something loose in his chest. A lead-in to complete his answer, Harry thought when he raised his head, but the next moment they were kissing again, open-mouthed and breathless. From the pit of his stomach, something swirled in answer, heedless and overbright. It felt like stars blurring — the way they might look at warp speed, the way no one ever saw them — and began to unlock the crushing grip that he’d kept on Tom, clutching him like a lifeline.
“It’s alright,” Tom murmured against his lips, “Harry—” But there was something of that same desperate need in his tone, the notion of a near-miss, the tremor of emergencies.
It joined them in a slipping, searching tangle that stole Harry’s breath and replaced it with a lighter element, prickling at the bottom of his lungs. He was tracing the shape of Tom’s mouth with his own, diving for a taste of him. So much that he’d never anticipated, like the slight curve of Tom’s smile that became part of the kiss, the sweetness of his touch when he framed Harry’s jaw with one hand, his arm slung around Harry’s waist with all the force of a holding clamp. One last line of mooring where all else had been jolted into motion, within and without, shivers of sensation that didn’t align flung up on a heat-draft.
“So... yes?” Tom murmured between kisses, breath and voice and want all merging into one.
And the forces of choice still jarred him, there was no way he could squeeze it all into any single word. Four years into the past and fifteen into the future, and in between opened the present like a breath long held.
“I’ve never fallen in love like this before,” Harry said without thinking. “That’s my only excuse.”
“You think you need an excuse?”
His heart was in his throat, his pulse leaping into the hollow of Tom’s palm.
Whatever time was, here it became a precipice, like the brink of a sheer drop down, or a premonition of flight. It pulled hard on his stomach as he pressed up against Tom, to feel himself within this reality, muscle and bone, in the catch of shortened breaths traded between them. Drawn up and released in the wake of Tom’s hands down his sides, desire slipped through him, but that was the least of it, almost familiar. Smooth and liquid and dark, like honey warmed over open flame. He pushed his hands under Tom’s sweater to feel the muscles shift along his back, the flutter of breath between his ribs. They were swaying back and forth together, rocked by the pulse of a different gravity. And each pulsebeat gripped and tightened him from the inside out. Harry caught himself thinking, if this is all, it will be enough, still thinking within the bounds of temporal continuity.
“I’ve no idea.” His voice rasped with the effort of seizing a clear thought. Tom was hard against him, and the marginal rhythm they’d found pulled on him like a ground swell. “What to do.”
“We’ll figure it out together.” The glitter was back in Tom’s eyes, focused on him with exclusive intent. “We can take things slow.”
Harry shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Oh. So then we don’t.”
Tom flashed him a wide grin, irresistible, and his hands settled on Harry’s hips to yank him closer, forcing another gasp that turned into a moan. There was a thready balance between this airless bubbling joy and a seriousness that reached down into every part of him, maybe not a balance they could keep for very long.
When Tom’s hold on him loosened and he leaned away, a tremor went through Harry’s stomach like the ripple of fear that sometimes ended his dreams, a fear of waking.
“We’d better.” Tom tipped his head towards the couch which was closer than his bed, but all Harry could see for the moment was the tense expectation in his face. His eyes the color of a brimming horizon where sea and sky met, holding a bit of both.
Then there was the couch, a brief stumble and a soft fall, and the gust of a near-soundless laugh went against Harry’s neck. With it came a wash of memory — all the off-duty hours they’d spent here side by side, in a comfortable, noncommittal sprawl — and scattered at the next breath, Tom’s breath darting across his lips in a faint tingle. Stretched out against him, Harry moved with a need that expanded towards the infinite, his shirt falling open under Tom’s hands, and every light caress across his bare skin made him shiver again. He secured his grip on Tom’s shoulder and traced his mouth along the neck of Tom’s sweater, tasting warmed cotton and a hint of salt and the flush that rode up his pale skin. A quicksilver ache rose through him, long familiar and yet unsettling for being so near, exposed to Tom’s restless touch.
The hand that skimmed his chest tripped swirls of sensation at random and urged them into bright, piercing focus. Closing the gaps between memory and desire. Translating a nervous jitter that turned pirouettes in Harry’s stomach, and he could see it reflected in Tom’s eyes, up close, when he raised his head. Out of a haze that kept them adrift, like air sparkling above a desert beach.
“You feel so... oh.”
“So do you,” Tom answered with a winded chuckle and dived again, his mouth moving against Harry’s throat to catch him right there, in the leap and stutter of pulse that knew no clear aim. “And you don’t know. How much I want you.”
But he could feel it in the pressure of Tom’s thigh between his legs, in the hard and fast breaths that came with every forward motion. In the battering of his own heart. He drew Tom’s hand down to the fasteners of his pants, and a fevered pang shot ahead of the motion, effect superseding the cause, if there was one. And he remembered: a light-like interval, outside the order of linear logic, while Tom’s fingers worked impatiently through layers of cloth, to find him and trap him in a jab of pure heat that made his teeth clench.
Relax, Harry told himself, it’s just pleasure — a predictable physical cycle, quickened blood and straining nerve that conspired for release — but there didn’t seem to be anything predictable about it when he met Tom’s eyes again, intense with a possessive pleasure, and just that look made him gasp.
“Let go,” Tom whispered, lips darting over Harry’s forehead, temple, and jaw, stopping nowhere. “Just once, Harry.”
And it already poured up his body, everything that he’d kept to himself, that he’d kept at a distance, rushing in to flood the gaps between being and wondering. It made him gasp and tremble, and the rhythm that took over came together in an uncharted flow, like a deep-space discovery of something profoundly anomalous, a new convergence of light and energy. The kind of discovery he’d always faced alone, on the brink between fear and excitement, alone, except that he wasn’t now, he could deliver this into Tom’s hands, into Tom’s mouth that covered his own and took in the broken sounds that struggled up his throat.
He pushed up into Tom’s hand, against the body that anchored him, hard edges and tense muscles pushing reality back into him. Hot and near, and filled to the limit with the simple beat of blood. The things he murmured and moaned all amounted to please Tom, though this way it would be over too soon. And not soon enough, by any means. The prick of goosebumps all over his skin, sweeping up and down, equaled the breaking down of boundaries, almost frightfully easy, crushed in the close circle of Tom’s fingers until he couldn’t think at all anymore, and his spine arched sharply with a crackle he could almost hear. Then a brilliant burst went up through his middle, shaken loose from the clutch of time, and seized his heart as much as every other part of himself, breaking out in a raw sound that took the rest of his breath.
It was loss and flight that took him away from himself, flung him out to a sparkling void, and then gave him back. To a low, ragged sound catching deep in Tom’s throat — and Tom pressed against him in time with the shudders that still gripped Harry, face buried at the curve of Harry’s throat. Tight, shallow breaths washing heat down his bared chest.
Harry needed some indefinite moments to retrieve a sense of up and down, to unclench his fingers from Tom’s hip and slide them along the waistband of his pants. “Let me—”
But Tom made a sound halfway between a gasp and a shaky laugh, and caught his hand. “Too late, I’m afraid.” His lips moved against the corner of Harry’s mouth. “Keep the thought till I’ve recovered, okay?”
Then he raised his hand and licked some sticky trails off his fingers, with casual relish.
And if he kept nothing else, he’d hang on to this one memory. Harry sagged back into the couch, into a changed sense of himself, still raw, so that every minor air current on his skin registered like an alert signal demanding attention. Just this once wasn’t nearly enough to release all the waiting of more-or-less two years.
“How long?” he asked.
“We’ll see, won’t we?” Tom’s grin returned, a little awkward but full of private delight.
Harry ran his fingers through the short strands that curled behind his ear, now damp with sweat, and realized that his own question had reached out far beyond the obvious. The real answer approached now and forever, more than he could possibly ask.
“I’ll hold you to it,” he said, a fair warning to his own mind. “I will.”
Flushed and glad, Tom was breathtakingly beautiful, and when he muttered “oh, shut up!” and kissed him again, it felt dazzling and impossibly easy, because the fevered pressing need was gone for the present.
Harry wrapped both arms around Tom’s neck, returning the kiss, returning breath for breath in a state of renewed disbelief. Something within him was readjusting, rustling untested wings, and — when his hands started to roam again — demanding that Tom’s rumpled clothes had to come off shortly.
Shifting and stretching with long, contented breaths, Tom cooperated easily, as if it were the most natural thing. Though he could probably sense that Harry, unprepared as he was, needed space and time to adjust to something he’d never anticipated.
Always before, he’d let himself experience attraction along clearly defined routes that matched his awareness of who he was. Even after he’d met Tom — especially after they’d met — to confirm the limits of change. There’d never been another man who exerted that kind of distorting pull on him, a magnetic draw that thrived on contradictions. Volatile and reliable at the same time, burning with unknowable purpose. He’d tried to maintain a steady orbit around that radiance, because you could follow and crave it, but Tom could never be truly reached, he’d always slip through your fingers. And right now, Harry was still in the process of contradicting himself, of laying his hands on a truth that contradicted him at every point.
And there was magic to it, too, to the way the dimmed lighting revealed Tom’s skin, picking out curves and angles under his touch, faint shimmers of perspiration tracing the long muscles, catching in the curls that covered his chest and tapered out down his belly. Darker blond edged with a hint of red, like flames reflected from a distance.
“You were right about the rainbow,” Harry found himself saying. “In theory, it’s predictable. But not in reality. It totally depends on who’s looking, the time and place they’re in.”
“Yeah?” From the way Tom watched him, he was reading intently between the lines.
“When I started to look, I missed the right moment.”
“Good thing I’ve made a habit of being unpredictable,” Tom answered, clearly pleased with himself. “Means there’s always room for another chance.”
And there was that, the conspiracy of time and chance coming together in a different alignment, which always involved risk beyond measure and calculation. Another and another and another, Harry thought, making a wish while his fingers outlined the muscles bunching over Tom’s stomach, up to the cove where the lowest ribs met, the taut skin vibrant with an echo of accelerating heartbeats.
When he looked up, Tom returned a hooded glance. “So how do I measure up to your expectations?”
“You’re kidding me, right?” His own voice sounded rough again, with surprise as much as desire. “This is. You are.” A vague gesture signaled the limits, or lack thereof.
Tom reached for his hand. “And what’s next?”
Harry glanced down at their linked fingers. Until the slipstream took them, there’d always been limits imposed, by silent consent, though now he suspected they’d been of his own making more than anything, and Tom had merely complied with what he’d seemed to want. A semblance of wanting, at counterpoint with all he couldn’t acknowledge, that he had to acknowledge now.
“Everything.”
“You’re starting to sound like me,” Tom observed with a crooked little smile.
“So.” Harry breathed in quick and hard. “Are you up to the challenge?”
“I should hope so.”
But the cover of confidence wasn’t so seamless now, through the gaps showed the cutting questions that Tom inflicted on himself sometimes. Harry leaned over him, enfolding him in a lighter shadow as his mouth skimmed across the fine laugh lines, barely perceptible now, that fanned out from Tom’s eyes to the corners of his mouth.
We’ll see, he echoed to himself. This could have been a one-time gift, after all, a sudden opening for a different future he’d never considered. Whether that future would grow conclusive or veer off unexpectedly and fracture again was a matter beyond speculation, here it became a matter of loving Tom with his hands, of shaping every touch to the needs of a singular moment. And he realized with a start that it came easy. After all this time of knowing Tom, watching the way he moved, settled or stretched, he was so familiar with Tom’s private rhythms that he only had to follow those tracks to unlock pleasure. To find the most tender spots, the right kind of pressure, and letting his mouth wander with the small flickers that showed in Tom’s face. A low hum drifted from his throat when Harry sat back to unfasten his pants and sweep them down his legs, his own following in afterthought.
Tom raked him with a long, heated glance as definite as any touch, still holding himself quiet. “This is. More than I—” A flick of one hand supplied the rest. “I just never thought.”
“Me neither.” The smile that came with this was like an overflow of all the warmth sprawling loose inside him.
And there would be more, still more. Harry eased back down beside him, caressing muscles that tensed and eased under Tom’s skin, touching here and there, electric current running back into him, rerouted along a new, unfinished circuit. And there seemed to be layers and layers to it, shifting, transparent layers of pleasure drawn across a core he was in no hurry to reach. It was, he thought as Tom arched his chest with a roughened breath, in some ways like the affinity between music and mathematics, clear rhythms and flawless precision joining up and building with a power that pierced and sang.
“Harry.” Tom trapped his fingers where they played with a whorl of darker curls below his navel. “You’ve got the most beautiful hands, you know? Always had a thing for them.”
It was one more thing that he hadn’t known, and when Tom wrapped one hand around his neck and kissed him deeply, Harry lost his breath over it all over again.
Now that every piece of clothing had been discarded to scatter on the floor, he pulled Tom against him and across him, and this — the full contact of skin on skin, the sliding, surging friction — gave him a startling sense of safety, of being grounded, a balance that he’d missed since their flight out into the Badlands. Ever since, he’d lived in a background state of loss, of being cut off, and for all the new discoveries, all the crises testing his resolve, that had never truly changed. Until now.
He gasped as Tom moved against him in a slow, unerring rhythm, ready to go under in a stronger current that sent ripples down every nerve and turned them into live wires. Languid, fire-edged ripples that went flush through his body as if the skin boundary was a temporary illusion about to dissolve. He raked his fingertips up along Tom’s neck and into his hair, tracing the starts of a fine shiver that became part of another kiss, Tom’s chest heaving against him with a hard breath. His tongue thrust against Harry’s, in time with the rhythm of his hips, and there were small, breathless sounds Harry couldn’t account for, Tom’s voice or his own. So close, and getting closer, no matter where he touched. His chest filled with a stumbling heartbeat while his hands coursed down the long back, curved into Tom’s spine, keeping track of the countless small reactions even as he turned them loose.
Touch, hold, and let go. No memories to trap him, nothing but the present. And it was suddenly easy, because nothing had ever felt just like this, like Tom — raising shivers all over him that demanded answers, at once, and threatened a short-circuit. When Harry let his head fall back, Tom’s mouth at his throat, he was afloat in a wide-reaching twilight relieved only by flitting lights, silver jabs of wanting that shaped their own pattern. Moving into sharp focus, almost unbearably sharp, and soon this would take him over, take out the barriers that controlled his mind. Wake him to another reality.
“You’re thinking.” Tom nipped at his ear and turned Harry’s face towards him. “Should I worry?”
Harry smiled and shook his head, because surely Tom could feel that he was all here, every physical response aligned to a single purpose. And perhaps it was odd that he should feel so clear-headed at a moment like this, but the diffuse heat running everywhere on his skin somehow resolved convolutions the brain couldn’t disentangle.
“So tell me,” Tom prompted, not at all impatient now, but he didn’t still his movements either.
“It’s. Time.” Still catching his breath, Harry reached up to touch his face, mooring himself. The tension was everywhere, laced through them and about them, no single point of origin, just a web unfolding from the present. A node in the continuum, marked as clearly as if it rippled with light.
With the blinding explosion of a shuttle, ripped apart between times.
“The other timeline, Tom, remember?” Harry breathed, swallowing hard. “You were left behind, and I found you in Marseilles.” Although Tom, within their shared time, had no memory of these events, his own mind refused the difference, because Tom was one and the same, always in the present. He could feel it, here. The same soul.
“If you hadn’t come through for me, I wouldn’t even exist in this time anymore.”
Tom’s hand coasted down his side, over his hip, along his thigh, even as he thought closely about it, and Harry had to stop himself from pushing back into the touch trailing sparks and prickles deep down into his belly.
“That other Tom Paris never made it to Voyager because he’d never met you on Deep Space Nine,” Tom called up the memory with a frown. “But... he ended up helping you back here, because you remembered me from Voyager.” Surprise unclouded his eyes. “Well, hell — how’s that for crossed circuits?”
“It’s like... another causal loop.” Harry tightened his hold in reflex. “You wouldn’t be here without me, and I wouldn’t be without you.”
“So what does that say to you?” Tom’s lips curled, and from it grew another one of those wild, brilliant smiles saying that he’d already answered the question for himself. With a rocking press of his hips, he increased the friction between them, and it rolled through Harry in a mind-blinding thrill.
“Something like... meant to be?” he rasped. It still went against the grain of his convictions, or maybe it felt too much like tempting fate. Between breaths, Harry pieced a cautioning thought back together. “At least... where our coexistence in the continuum is concerned.”
Tom laughed. “Aw, Harry, stop it! I’ll show you coexistence...”
And that was the last coherent sentence either of them managed to get out for a while.
There was pleasure, and then there was more, a breaching blow-out of energy that flew off the scales, past control, past knowing what his body did in the tangle of limbs and escalated heartbeats. There was Tom’s rhythm joined to his own, his thighs clenching around Tom’s hips and the grinding pressure transformed into something else, weightless and wider, like time measured in light.
He could feel it slide and carve into him, settling to become more than memory, shaping tracks as deep as instinct and just as precise. The sound of Tom’s voice flying out with a single sharp cry, detached from their joined, shattered breathing. And it finally left them in a loose embrace, skin and sweat and slowly leveling pulse, while cooler air currents stirred over them.
Harry kept his eyes closed and listened to the heartbeat that pattered against the side of his face, Tom’s heartbeat drumming through skin and bone like the fading echo and the first inkling of faraway music. His fingers moved in unconscious imitation, as if he could spin it out, coax a symphony from the tapping of a single beat, and imagine all the harmonies and counterpoints alongside. A life wouldn’t be enough.
Yet life was now, and perhaps he should be more afraid than he’d been before because now there was so much more to lose, but he wasn’t. And the absence of fear was more than a kind of zero state, it felt like a raw element of its own.
“Tom,” Harry murmured, “I love you, like I’ve never loved you before,” hoping that Tom would be able to make sense of it. “I couldn’t have.”
When Tom just held him tighter in return, he squeezed his eyes shut — a little more of this and his heart might break, but perhaps that was required to make way for a different future.
One of the things he said that night — late into the night, in fact — was, “I think I’ve figured out that I’m not cut out for command. A captain with my own ship.” Harry paused a moment to let that long-cherished ambition drift by. “I’m not even sure I want that anymore.”
After the inevitable side-trip to the shower, they’d finally made it to Tom’s bed where a single lighting panel cast its muted glow across the sheets. Tom shrugged one shoulder, completely relaxed, and traced a swirling pattern across Harry’s chest that was bound to shiver his thoughts apart again, sooner or later. “What makes you think that?”
“I can’t live with the mistakes I make and move on,” Harry pointed out the obvious. “And that’s what the captain needs to do all the time—” He broke off to amend, “not that she makes all that many. But I’d always want to go back and fix things. Like I did, or would have done in that... other future.”
“You’ve got a pretty hefty conscience on you,” Tom said lightly and placed two fingers over his mouth when Harry started to protest. “No, it’s true — you’ve got so much of it, you used to let me borrow some, remember? It’s a natural feature.”
“I guess. One that makes me look back over my shoulder too often, instead of looking ahead.”
“Sometimes,” Tom agreed, sounding entirely unconcerned. “We can work on that. But it also makes you determined to do things right, no matter what. As to living with your mistakes. Look at me.”
“Yeah?” Harry murmured, but looking at Tom changed meaning again midway — when there was such a high color in Tom’s face, his eyes summer blue, he could seem to do little else — and the point of this conversation was starting to escape him. “What’s your secret?”
“I—” Tom broke off and no longer looked as if he could turn out a simple answer. “Actually, I didn’t. I figured I had a past that followed me around anyway, no matter what I did. Didn’t need me staring it down to exist, not when it was fixed in everybody else’s heads, right? I used to live in that little bubble of my own, all defense and distance.” He used one hand to sketch it into the air, a wobbly circle, and quirked a grin in afterthought, but something more serious started to smolder around the edges. “Well, that was before I got assigned to Voyager. And then we met.” The grin softened into a smile, as close to nostalgic as Tom ever got. “Remember how you questioned me about Caldik Prime, that very first day? And the weird thing is, for the first time in I don’t know how long I was... afraid of being judged.”
“By me, of all people?” Harry shifted under his glance, incredulous and more than a little uncomfortable with that particular memory. “As I remember it, I questioned you like the opinionated, half-assed... prig that I was.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Tom acknowledged with another slight grin, slowly ruffling his fingers through the thick strands behind Harry’s ear. So much affection in every touch that it came through clear as an infrared signal, something that had been there all along, at reduced levels, but Harry still wondered uneasily how he’d managed to miss it.
“There’s another?”
Tom’s hand stilled. “There’s something... pure about you, Harry, I don’t think you realize. I haven’t seen it in anyone else. Except maybe Kes.” And the force of it actually reflected in his eyes, a deeper shade of blue like the sky beneath a midnight sun. “I guess I’d forgotten all about it in prison. Looking at you showed me the difference between clear and — clouded.”
Harry blinked and found his voice with delay, grown hoarse with disbelief. “You’re not. You shine.”
“That’s what you see.” Tom leaned over to capture his mouth in a slow, searching kiss that shaped a truth of its own, warm and heady, and confirmed what he’d just claimed alongside.
“Always,” Harry answered finally, and had to start over to work that into a comprehensible statement, “I always saw that.”
Tom’s fingers drifted along his jaw, tracing down and down to the source of his sauntering pulse till they were splayed over the middle of Harry’s chest, mapping the perimeter of his heart. “What I’m trying to say is. That was a turning point. You get broken down into pieces, but you can still use them to assemble something new.”
Nothing ever broke me down before, Harry thought, and retrograde alarm flashed in the pit of his stomach, not that hard, not even Akritiri, but it was the notion that Tom had come through the whole of it that tightened his gut in a sudden frost.
“You know, I always wanted to be a captain at sea,” Tom said, and his voice changed. “Let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness...”
“Moby Dick?” Harry guessed. “Look. Maybe—”
But he didn’t finish the thought, because now, of all times, he didn’t want to think about returning to the Alpha Quadrant or the plethora of choices they’d inevitably face. He reached for Tom’s hand instead, lifting it to his mouth so that he could trail kisses up from the inner wrist to the soft pad of his thumb, along the crisscrossing lifelines that patterned Tom’s palm. Prompted by some urgent impulse, as if he could lay a protective spell across Tom’s skin.
What had he been thinking all this time — that if Tom loved him back, it would also lay him bare to danger, worse than before, that it might interfere with Tom’s instincts somehow, his ability to outwit or dogde the unexpected? One more risk that they couldn’t afford, one more factor that might tip a precarious balance...
And that was the voice of fear talking, warped by the mathematic reality of contingencies and the general tendency of all things to fall apart within time.
“Maybe what?” Tom asked and tipped his chin up.
“It can wait.” Harry met his eyes with absolute conviction.
“The maybes can go hang for all I care,” Tom said with a deep breath, “so long as you look at me like this” — then he switched to a different mood, deliberately. “And here I thought I’d have to make love to you all night to make you see—”
“I’m not that thick and slow,” Harry cut in with feigned indignation.
“Oh, it wouldn’t’ve been such a hardship.” Tom pursed his lips as if he had to give it serious consideration. “But the good thing is, we’ve still got all night.”
Not enough, he would have thought only hours before, not enough by far. But out here, it was endless, night expanded around them in every direction, a light-pierced vastness that sheltered distant fires. Harry could feel it now, closer than before. The whole of the ship, a fragile shell suspended among the crushing forces of an unknown quadrant, all the people within that he cared for. And here they were at the heart of it, still keeping a tight, breathless hold. If they had the night, they had everything, all they’d ever have.
“I’ve got a thing for your hair, too,” Tom said, running his fingers through it. “But why d’you always get it cropped so short these days?”
“It keeps getting in my face.” Harry smiled at the exasperated look that got him. “I can let it grow again.”
“Do.” Tom’s breath tickled his ear, and from the small sensation came a breathtaking sense of freedom.
Perhaps another timeline existed where none of this would ever happen. Tom hadn’t come to the shuttlebay to see him off, they’d never touched like this, and perhaps Tom had patched it up with B’Elanna instead till they could make it work. Perhaps within that time, Harry continued inside the trap of waiting he’d constructed for himself, always working hard to get things perfectly right, performing maintenance on the status quo. Perhaps he’d even get a career out of it, once they made it back home.
And there could well be other threads in the temporal web, ruptured threads because he’d died on an away mission, in a freak accident, during a Kazon attack, or Tom had, and those might be the likeliest timelines by far. The ghost of a chill breathed from the gap of fifteen years that he still felt, even after it had sealed over.
Years unlived but not lost without a trace — there was a subtle resonance now that Harry could feel right down to his bones. Because he finally understood that the future was no blast wave building somewhere on the horizon, it was here, in the fine cuts between breath and touch. It was physical, like desire, and all he wanted was surrender to it, no matter how unlikely this one future might be.
“Maybe,” he traced his own thought back to a different answer. “Maybe time just doesn’t care about a discontinuity or two.”
“Is that what we are? Some kind of anomaly?” Tom arched his eyebrows in mock-disappointment. “One small quirk hoping to be overlooked?” But there was a nervous flicker beneath his amusement, and something in his tone implied questions he wouldn’t — maybe couldn’t — ask.
Harry shook his head slowly, pursuing that faint trail one step at a time while his fingers dipped over the tension lines in the corner of Tom’s eye, the defensive reflex that lived there. He bent nearer to soothe it with his lips, cradling Tom’s face in his hands, and Tom grew very still under his touch, only the fingers of one hand curled in tight against Harry’s back.
I know. Harry brushed their mouths together and closed his eyes, wondering how it felt to live most every waking minute on the verge between fight or flight. All that excess energy, and the drain of it, too — and he really shouldn’t be surprised to come up against it here, between them. He’d known long enough, hadn’t he, that Tom’s relationship with happiness was complicated, that Tom’s life before Voyager had been one extended switchback ride until all those sharp reversals made it impossible to believe that anything held together for long. And if that basic caveat made it easy for Tom to pick his way through volatile situations of every kind — to sail and breeze through them, really — anything longterm reliable was a tough proposition, like a walk out across a tightrope. No hopes, no disappointments, his basic philosophy.
Harry wrapped him in a tight embrace, scattering kisses along Tom’s throat and jaw and cheek while a hot pressure built in his chest and spanned the entire range from laughter to tears. And he almost burst out it with it — what, you think you can have me, but you’ll never get to keep me? — when that was the easiest thing among them all.
“No,” he answered finally, “more, so much more. I’ll show you. Let me, please.”
Tom let a sharp breath go, and that, more than anything, convinced Harry that he’d made his point, or a start towards it at least. All that it took now was time, the seconds he spread out between his fingers running over heated skin, the moment when Tom’s mouth opened under his own, between one heartbeat and another. And the wanting didn’t pause or slacken, it still grew beyond anything he’d felt and locked away over the past two years, once unlocked it swept him like a trajectory out to the brilliant heart of a primary. Moving towards it was easy, a minor shift and a tilt of angles, and they were tangled up in each other, kissing, pressing for more, every muscle tense and warm. When Tom seized him closer with a rough gasp, he lowered his mouth to the hollow of Tom’s throat to tell him, “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s holding on.”
Tom murmured something that sounded rather like thank god you are, but when he raised his head and his fingers closed hard around Harry’s neck, his expression wavered somewhere between passion and surprise. “I need this. You.”
Flushed and aroused, lips parted on his ragged breathing, Tom was beautiful, like he’d only just come to his senses. And it might be the hardest thing for him to say.
“Then we’re even.” Harry dropped back against the sheets and pulled Tom along, giddy with joy that enfolded him like a living element and drove out his breath in quick bursts. “Tom, c’mere, I’m ready, make love to me, now.”
Like there’s no tomorrow, like we’ve got all the tomorrows in the universe — there was no difference.
All that mattered was taking his place, not a matter of coordinates but of a single moment when his heart lurched, his skin burned and every nerve tightened to the chill of white energies, with Tom inside him and all around him, and he was here, where he’d never thought to find himself. Home.
Later still, when ship’s time cycled towards a fixed point of morning, his mind was still afloat, couldn’t stop being awake, though cogent thinking had blown over a while back. He remembered the face in that message from the future, from a life suspended in shadow, desperate for deliverance. Fifteen years in that man’s life, Tom had been dead, and his future self had given everything to bring him back, change reality and bring them back. There was no question in Harry’s mind now as to what he owed him. He felt Tom’s even breaths against the nape of his neck, like a low, gentle tide.
I’d lost you. I could have. I won’t. In time.
Then Tom’s mouth brushed his skin, and his arm tightened over Harry’s chest.
“Harry,” Tom whispered, with a deep breath out of sleep, assuring himself that he was still here, that he would be — “y’know, don’t you, Harry...”
And everything was right there, in the sound of Tom’s voice shaping his name like a vital fact, like the solution to a whole set of equations with too many unknown variables, everything he’d ever wanted.
Always, Harry translated it to himself, a manifold crushed into one invariant point, in the blink of an eye. But the only true measure of time was light, he’d known that for years though he’d never realized it could feel like that, too. And he murmured back “yes,” yes to everything, releasing himself as sleep eased into him, out of Tom’s hands and into the night.
∞ ∞ ∞
Epilogue
2390, ALPHA QUADRANT
U.S.S. CHALLENGER: STARDATE 71143.3
Captain Geordi La Forge tapped his console and brought up the latest news bulletin that ‘Fleet dispatched to ships running border patrol. Their mission on the edges of the Alpha Quadrant was strictly JIC — just-in-case stuff — and the routine was beginning to create a haze in his mind, a false sense of security and detachment.
Odd, La Forge thought. Aboard the Enterprise, he’d never known a dull moment. But then, even during idle periods, when observation duty or playing chaperone to diplomatic envoys tied them down, he’d had the ship’s systems at his fingertips, as complex an organism as any they’d ever encountered in the far reaches of the galaxy. He pressed his palms together, bugged to feel so out of touch.
The bulletin didn’t seem to offer much by way of vicarious excitement either. It was the usual mixed batch drawn from Department reports, scientific discoveries and social highlights, the toxic stew of Federation politics always simmering in the background. La Forge frowned over an entry contributed by Starfleet Research and Development, regarding experiments with a Borg transmitter.
A device salvaged from a wrecked Borg cube, apparently, but its function remained frustratingly vague. Neutral as the phrasing was, La Forge gathered that ‘Fleet Security, R&D and the Department of Temporal Investigations were at loggerheads over the thing, debating whether or not it should be tested for application in Starfleet vessels.
La Forge shook his head and sent a glance through the viewport, but the deep silvered range out there only seemed to tighten the confines of his ready room. He paged through the rest of the bulletin, at once distracted and impatient, until something else drew his eye.
B’ELANNA TORRES AWARDED THE COCHRANE MEDAL OF EXCELLENCE, one of the headings ran, and he paused there, smiling to himself. He’d closely followed the blazing trail that Torres cut across Starfleet R&D and several affiliated institutes, ever since the return of Voyager in 2378. Half-Klingon, Ex-Maquis — and, in his opinion, currently the most brilliant engineer in the entire Federation. La Forge had recently studied her innovative work on quantum inverters and hoped to discuss it with her in person, next time he made it back to Earth.
He opened the vid file and listened as Torres delivered her acceptance speech, her first thank-you directed at Vice Admiral Janeway. Seated right beside the podium, Janeway beamed with pride herself, the twinkle of a tear tucked into the corner of one eye.
“I owe everything,” Torres was saying, “and I mean everything, to the crew of Voyager, especially her captain, who put up with all my temper tantrums, my crazy ideas, my refusal to play by the rules — so long as I got the engines to give me what I wanted — and still trusted me to find workable solutions...”
Amazing woman, La Forge thought as Torres flashed her teeth in a wild, unabashed smile.
“Others would’ve had me thrown in the brig,” she continued in the same wry tones, “and you know what? I couldn’t have blamed them. But Captain Janeway showed tremendous patience and actively encouraged me. That’s how I got here.”
The image cut to the reception after that, showing Torres surrounded by current colleagues and former crewmates. Lights sparked off raised champagne glasses, jazz strains from the background mixed with laughter and snatches of conversation. As an official with a brass-heavy chest stepped past, the view opened on a throng of former Voyager crew.
Beside Kathryn Janeway, La Forge recognized Captain Tuvok, whose dispassionate countenance showed un-vulcan hints of levity for once, then his glance caught on a pair in the background. Although both men wore civilian clothes, they clearly belonged to the Voyager pack. La Forge couldn’t put names to them, but they seemed vaguely familiar... in a way that sent an odd little chill skittering down his backbone. Like a déjà vu. He paused the vid and keyed for magnification to get a closer look.
Two men of Terran descent, as near as he could tell, one lean and blond, the other dark and stockier, with Asian coloring. Their smiles were directed at each other more than the crowd or the exuberant Torres with a thoughtless intimacy. Puzzled, La Forge raised his eyebrows and pulled up the embedded data that identified the couple as Tom Paris, retired Starfleet pilot, now a captain in Naval Patrol back on Earth, and Dr. Harry Kim, head of research at the Cochrane Center of Temporal Mechanics. That name, at least, rang a bell. La Forge remembered reading a paper on engineered wormholes, co-authored by Kim and Torres, not long ago.
He restarted the vid at a slowed rate of sixty-three percent and watched as Paris lifted a hand to brush a fall of black hair back from Kim’s forehead. Yes, definitely a couple. La Forge shrugged to himself. There was no reason whatsoever why watching them sent an uncomfortable frisson through his nerves. He watched as the vid played itself out in slow time, then dissolved into abrupt black. Perhaps he was developing a mild case of cabin fever, after all those dragging weeks out here on the border.
With a sigh, La Forge closed the bulletin. He’d reserved the next three hours to recalibrate Challenger’s plasma manifolds and was about to push from his chair when the comm link buzzed. A call from Starfleet Command coming through on a subspace frequency, his Operations officer informed him. La Forge sagged back in his seat, halfway towards mourning his time in Engineering — but another part of him was galvanized with anticipation.
The small screen showed two headshots instead of one. “Captain,” Admiral McIntyre greeted him, a frown graved across his entire face. “There has been an accident in the Takara sector that we want you to investigate. At top warp, you should be able to reach the coordinates within eight hours.”
A blue signal on the panel announced that said coordinates were being transmitted to Challenger’s helm even as they spoke. They sure weren’t wasting any time.
“Accident?” La Forge asked. “What kind of an accident?”
“We can’t be certain at this time,” McIntyre told him. “A civilian vessel picked up readings that show wreckage in orbit around the second planet, possibly the remains of a scout ship sent by the Romulan Empire.”
La Forge felt his features tighten. Bad news. The peacy treaty with the Romulans had been stitched together nine years before, and it’d been coming apart at the seams ever since. If the Empire blamed the Federation for destroying their scout, one small incident could shake the whole thing loose and, who knew, provide the ignition spark for a galactic crisis.
“This is Agent Mowin,” the Admiral introduced the man beside him with a curt nod. “Temporal Investigations has analyzed the sensor data, and they believe that a temporal anomaly may be responsible for the accident.”
“Tell me all about it,” La Forge returned, leaning closer to the screen.
“All the available data is in the encrypted file we’re sending you,” Mowin said coolly. A nondescript man with a receding hairline and a bland expression. “The readings we’ve analyzed are most unusual, but at this point we can merely speculate about the nature of the anomaly. It’s your job to investigate the site and supply us with additional information.”
“Understood,” La Forge said tersely. What did he care if the man treated him like some sort of underling to his precious Department? They had their own arcane priorities, he had his. “I’ll get back to you if I have any questions.”
“This mission rates top secrecy,” Mowin stressed, his eyes shifting nervously towards the Admiral. “Keep the information you impart to your crew to an absolute minimum.”
“I’ll do what I can,” La Forge assured him through clenched teeth. “Challenger out.”
Snapping and stretching his fingers in a fretful rhythm, he thought about it. A temporal anomaly in the Takara sector, just outside the Alpha Quadrant. An unclaimed region where nothing ever happened. He shook his head, tried to ignore the ambivalent prickle sliding through his gut, and tapped his combadge instead.
“La Forge to Bridge. Plot a course for the coordinates transmitted by ‘Fleet Command. I’ll be with you shortly.”
There was no reason why these orders tightened his nerves with a lower-grade alarm, no defensible reason at all that he could pinpoint. For a moment longer, he stared at the glowing Starfleet emblem at the center of the dormant screen. It was still there when he closed his eyes, an afterimage in neon yellow, dissolving slowly in a burst of white.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.”
(Herman Melville, Moby Dick)
∞ ∞ ∞