Chapter Text
At 0742 the last of the supply crates finished materializing in the grass as the transporter shimmer faded.
Voyager was gone.
Janeway stood in the long grass and felt the going of the ship in her chest before she felt it anywhere else. What was left was not silence. There was wind in the trees, and something insectile clicking in the grass, and a low two-note call from somewhere in the canopy that she did not recognize. She had not realized, until this moment, how much of the ship she had been hearing all along. Over a year of warp hum, ventilation cycling, and the quiet noises that meant Voyager was alive.
Now she was gone.
She turned in a slow circle. The sun was warm. The air was thick and green, faintly sweet with growing things that had never passed through an environmental filter. Beyond the clearing and back through the tree line, the Drake sat where Tom had left it. It was the way back, if things went as planned.
She knelt by the crates. Petri dishes. Protein analyzer. DNA sequencers, two of them for redundancy. She unsealed each container in the order she had requested, checking each before moving to the next. Voyager had sent down everything she had asked for and then some. Someone had padded the manifest. She smiled to herself.
"Do you really think you can find a cure, Captain?"
She looked up.
He stood three meters away. She had not heard him approach. He was a quiet one.
"It may take some time," she said. "But yes. If I can find a specimen of the insect that infected us, I can start mapping protein cofactors. We need to know what it is about this place that keeps the virus dormant. Once we know that, we can replicate it."
He watched her. In the green light beneath the canopy his eyes seemed to hold no distinction between iris and pupil at all.
There was nothing wrong with his eyes.
"Good," he said. "I'll help however I can. I don't like it here. It's too bright... And open."
The breeze moved through the trees behind him. Somewhere a bird—or whatever passed for a bird here—gave the same low two-note call.
"Well then, Mr. Suder." She bent and picked up one of the preformed dwelling panels—lighter than it looked, faintly cool against her palm—and held it out to him. "The sooner we assemble the shelter, the better."
He came forward and took the panel. His fingers did not brush hers.
She noticed that he had taken care they would not.
She turned back to the crates.
There was a cure to find. There was a shelter to build. There was light enough to begin.
<<>>
"What the hell were you thinking?"
Chakotay did not turn from the viewport. The ready room was dim—the lights had stepped down to evening levels half an hour ago and no one had raised them. His reflection looked back at her from the glass instead of his face. Mike Ayala stood near the door, two paces behind her, the way a man stood when he had come along but did not consider himself the one with the question.
"I beg your pardon, Lieutenant."
"Don't you Lieutenant me, you son of a bitch."
"B'Elanna."
He said it quietly. He still had not turned.
She had promised herself she would not lose her temper. She drew a slow breath, counted it out the way she had been practicing since coming aboard Voyager. It did not help.
"How could you leave the Captain down there with Suder?"
He did not answer.
"You know what he's like."
He still said nothing.
"She's not safe."
At last he lowered his head. His hands remained clasped behind his back. He looked every bit the captain. B'Elanna wished, just for once, he'd answer like Chakotay.
"He's done his job since he's been on this ship. Nothing's happened."
"Yeah? Well, he's not on the ship anymore, is he?"
Chakotay answered with a long silence. B'Elanna had run out of ways to ask the same question.
Then Ayala, who had not spoken until now, said quietly to the bulkhead, "I should have stayed down there."
Chakotay turned his head just enough to catch Ayala's reflection in the viewport. He did not turn around.
"You weren't infected, Mike. She wouldn't have let you stay even if you'd asked."
Ayala took a breath. He had served with Suder for two years in the Maquis. He had watched him do something to a Cardassian prisoner that he had never put in any report. He had assumed, when Suder came aboard Voyager, that Chakotay understood exactly who he was.
Now Chakotay was standing with his back to the room, saying nothing had happened.
Ayala swallowed the rest.
"I'm the head of her security detail," he said. "I should be there."
"She doesn't need to be protected from a member of her own crew, Lieutenant."
Ayala held his gaze in the reflection for another second.
"Keep telling yourself that, Chak."
Without waiting to be dismissed, he turned and walked out. The door slid shut behind him.
B'Elanna stayed where she was.
She had given him every chance to answer. He had answered once, and the answer had been so small it might as well have been silence. Looking at the angle of his shoulders in the darkened glass, she understood this was as much as she was going to get tonight.
She turned and followed Ayala out.
When the door closed, Chakotay closed his eyes.