Chapter 6

THE RAIN WAS surprisingly cold.

B’Elanna huddled miserably under what little shelter she had been able to find, a cluster of enormous leaves close to the ground. She was grateful for her new “clothes,” although the skin she’d been able to get from the grikshak still smelled of carrion and her flesh cringed from the moist underside where it touched her. But, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“You know, Mother,” she said aloud, just to hear her own voice, “we could have had a nice, traditional reunion in some pleasant café over a cup of coffee.”

The soft, seemingly endless patter of rain was her only answer.

Even had her mother not decided to play this potentially deadly game of hide-and-seek with her only offspring, Torres knew that Miral wouldn’t be caught dead [70] in a pleasant café. No, if they weren’t here in this miserable wet wilderness, they’d be knocking back mugs of bloodwine and singing loud, grating Klingon songs. Maybe this was better.

She didn’t want to admit it, but a part of her—a very small part—was enjoying this. B’Elanna had always thrived on pushing her own limits. She dove on every engineering challenge with gusto that would have pleased Kahless himself. She couldn’t count the hours she had lain awake in bed, in recent years with Tom snoring softly beside her, staring at the ceiling while her mind chewed on one problem or another. Her desire to excel, to make a difference, had driven her all her life. But Torres had never really thought about it too much.

Except now, she had a lot of time on her hands with often nothing to do but think. And she wasn’t necessarily happy with what she saw floating to the top of her consciousness.

Why had she been so driven? It was easy to lay the blame on her parents, but that was not really the whole story. Her mother had pushed B’Elanna into Klingon culture with too much enthusiasm and too little preparation for it. Everything she had done had been done full tilt, with lots of yelling and broad gestures. Her quiet father had not been able to compete. B’Elanna still hadn’t had a chance to talk to him, to ask him, as one adult to another, what had really transpired between him and Miral. That had been one of the things she had wanted to do, but she hadn’t expected this, hadn’t expected her mother to throw still one more impossible challenge at her half-human [71] daughter, hadn’t expected to be sitting naked but for a dead animal skin alone in the wilderness while cold rain sluiced down—

Torres wiped at a face that was wet with more than raindrops.

This was no game. This was no stint in a monastery, or lecture, or four-hour excursion to sit, bored to death, at a performance of Klingon opera. This was very real, was very deadly, and Miral had done this for a reason.

Torres reviewed her time on the Barge of the Dead. Even now, her heart sped up at the recollection. What a terrifying experience that had been. All her repressed memories of Klingon myth and legend had shot to the surface, with sharp teeth, sharp weapons, and sharp, painful memories of failure and disappointments.

She’d done what she’d needed to, in the misty realm of whatever it had been—spirit, shared dreaming, subconscious. And beyond all the logic with which the very pragmatic B’Elanna Torres understood, somehow Miral had known about it.

“But that wasn’t enough for you, Mother, was it?” she said, again speaking aloud. “I couldn’t just save you in the spirit world, I had to come here and do it all over again in the material world. How many times do I have to prove myself worthy to you?”

And the answer came almost like a physical blow inside her skull: Until you believe it yourself.

She laughed, shakily, more unsettled than amused by the forceful revelation. “Well,” she said, “that could take forever.”

But even as she said it, she knew it had better not. It had been fine to be the sullen rebel, the wild child, [72] when it was only herself who stood to lose. But things had changed. Now, there were others. Her mother, stubbornly ensconced in the wilderness until Torres came to find her. Her father, who so clearly wanted to make things right again, if he could. And her own, immediate family: Tom, whom she loved more than she hated herself, and her beautiful, perfect daughter, named for her grandmother. Their fates all hinged on what B’Elanna did this moment, this hour, this day, this month. It was a weight she never thought she’d have to carry, but she found the burden a sweet one.

She was so lost in reverie that she didn’t noticed the rain slowing down until it had almost completely stopped. She blinked as the dark green light of the jungle shifted slowly to brighter hues, and the steady, soothing rhythm of the rain gave way to first silence, then the tentative calling of birds and animals.

She crawled out from under her shelter of leaves and her hand immediately sank wrist-deep in mud. Only a few days ago that would have produced a snort of disgust. Now, she stepped forward, dropped the cloak for the time being, and slathered the protective mud all over her body.

She was adapting. She was growing.

She was meeting the Challenge of Spirit, and as she smoothed the smelly, goopy stuff over her arms and torso, she understood why the priests and priestesses had chosen that name for this ordeal.

Libby waited nervously for him to appear. She had made a halfhearted attempt to put on some makeup, but then at the last moment had washed it off. There was no [73] need to dress up. This wasn’t a date, it was business. Deadly, dangerous business.

Tourists didn’t frequent the site she had chosen for their rendezvous. It was a rocky shoreline about a mile or two from her little cabin, without the long stretches of white sand that sunbathers flocked to. She had walked here; the brisk wind had brought some color back into her pale cheeks and the exercise had helped her to feel slightly more alert.

He materialized about five minutes after she had arrived. She hadn’t seen him since Covington had requested the temporary transfer. He looked good.

Tall, slender, his golden hair turning silver, he was dressed informally, as she had requested, in slightly baggy pants and a sweater. She recognized the sweater. She remembered pulling it off him the first time they had made love.

He saw her and waved, walking toward her carefully amid the rocks. She tucked her hands under her arms and smiled back, somewhat tightly. The wind was having far too much fun with her thick, curly hair, and she knew it’d be a rat’s nest by the time she had a chance to comb it out. If she’d been thinking she’d have pulled it back in a ponytail, at least.

He stood beside her now, much taller than she. It was the first time they had met in private since he had gently taken her hands, looked into her eyes, and said that they needed to end it.

“Hello, sir,” she said, and extended her hand.

He shook it, his hand warm and strong as it closed about hers. She knew he hadn’t wanted to end it, had in fact wanted to take it further, but Assistant Director [74] Aidan Fletcher realized before Libby had that their romance was destroying their working relationship. They’d remained good friends and in the end, the supervisor-employee relationship hadn’t been damaged. He’d been right to break things off, though she had cried for days at the time.

“It’s good to see you, Agent Webber. Though considering the distinctly informal aspect of our environment, I’d prefer it if you called me Aidan.”

“All right.” She pressed a small button in the pocket of her jacket. Almost immediately she heard a small chirp from Aidan’s jacket. She blushed.

He laughed. “You tried to put up a dampening field without telling me,” he said. “I see Covington’s taught you how to sneak.”

His easy manner was calming her. She gave him a quick grin. “Impossible to sneak past you,” she said.

His smile faded a little. “Listen, um ... It’s no secret that you’ve gotten back together with Harry Kim, so I assume you wanted to see me on business.”

Harry. If she hadn’t been disentangled from Aidan, she never would have been free to rediscover him. She had told Harry, at the banquet, that she’d slept with a few men and fallen in love with one. She felt a surge of gratitude toward that one man, who now stood before her, for being wise enough to let her go.

“You’re right,” she said. “This is business. Deadly business, I think.”

“How very cloak and dagger of you, Miss Webber.”

“Don’t joke!” At her expression, he sobered at once. “I’m onto something big.”

“Go on.” He listened intently, his gray eyes fastened [75] on hers, as she told him what had happened. She left nothing out—not Covington’s order to start dating Harry again, not the story of a fictitious mole who would eventually “turn out to be” Kenneth Montgomery, not her stalking of and eventual meeting with Trevor Blake.

That did get a reaction from him. “Blake?” Aidan said, startled. “I had no idea he was borrowed expertise. He showed up one day with not much fanfare and just stayed. We all kind of forgot about him. He’s—well, I suppose you know.”

She nodded. “He’s not particularly memorable,” she said. “He kept every memo from Montgomery in his computer. I mean every single one—birthday parties, baby shower announcements, you name it.” She hesitated, then asked, “Aidan—does the term Royal Protocol mean anything to you?”

“It’s a horrible document that Starfleet ought to have banned as torture,” Aidan said. “Is there any other reference?”

“It was one of the files on Blake’s computer. I was slogging through it like a good little agent when all of a sudden it turned to gibberish,” said Libby.

“Gibberish?”

“As in deeply encrypted information. I’ve got the basic decryption skills they teach every agent at my level, but there’s much more there I simply can’t crack. Here’s what I have learned, though. This Borg virus didn’t come to Earth with Voyager. It’s been around for a long time—say, for a few hundred years. I think the Borg booby-trapped their vessels, trying to find a way to spread the virus eventually even if they were destroyed.”

[76] Aidan nodded. “It makes sense, but why hide this? It’s exactly what we should be doing. Investigating.”

“That’s what I thought. I guess Starfleet doesn’t want everyone to know they knew about this virus and did nothing to stop it, or even warn anyone about the debris.” Bitterly, she added, “I just broke a few more words that lead me to believe that the virus is spread by physical contact.”

Aidan stared. “You mean, if anyone touched the debris, they’d become infected?”

“It sounds that way.”

“But then why hasn’t it happened long before now? We’ve had some of that debris around for years.”

She shrugged helplessly. “Who knows? It could be a set program—the thing doesn’t become active until after a certain number of years.”

“Or the virus could be mechanical, not organic,” mused Aidan. “We know the Borg use nanoprobes for many things. Maybe it needed a command.”

“Then what’s the command? Who gave it? Why? But again, Aidan—my skills are so basic it’s entirely possible that I’m deciphering it all incorrectly. There’s so much I still don’t know and I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”

He smiled. “As a famous Baker Street detective said, ‘It is a mistake to theorize without all the data.’ ”

She looked at him steadily. He made the leap quickly and said, “Oh. Now I understand why you contacted me.”

“I need your help. I need one of your cryptographers to do a blind decoding.”

“Impossible,” he said. “I can’t authorize that.”

“You have to,” she said. “If this goes as deep as I think it might, you would be put in danger.”

[77] “And you won’t be?”

“I’m already in danger. If Covington is going to suspect me, she suspects me by now. This could be nothing. As I said, I may be seeing conspiracies where none exist.”

“If the public policy is to shift blame to Voyager when it’s Starfleet poking and prodding that’s let the genie out of the bottle, that’s a conspiracy right there.”

She waved her hand impatiently. “A minor misdirection, easily rectified by a public apology when the virus is cured. If that’s really all it is. But things aren’t adding up, Aidan. It’s just too strange. My gut is telling me that there’s something more, a lot more, and I need to know what it is.”

“So do I. I’m your boss, remember?”

“Please just do this for me. As a favor. I’ve never asked anything from you before. You’re the only one I can trust.” She was aware that she was pleading, and she didn’t like it, but she saw no other course. She also didn’t tell him that she wasn’t even completely sure she could trust him. She had no idea how deep things went at Starfleet Intelligence. It was possible that Aidan was involved.

If he was, she was literally living on borrowed time.

His eyes searched hers for a long moment. “All right. On one condition—that if there is something here bigger than finger-pointing, you call me in the minute you know anything. Do you promise?”

She nodded, vastly relieved. She would, of course, make that call when she had all the information.

“Okay.” He shifted uncomfortably on the jagged rocks. “I don’t suppose I can take you out for lunch?”

[78] “I don’t know that our being seen together is a wise idea right now. If something big is going down, and I go with it, you’ll need to be free from Covington’s suspicion to act.”

“If you were anyone else, I’d accuse you of melodrama,” he said. “But I know you too well. All right. Send me that information and I’ll have someone get on it immediately.”

Impulsively, she reached for his hand. “Thank you, Aidan,” she said, her heart full. “Thank you.”