Chapter 1

“Captain Kathryn Janeway, this is Auckland Control. You are now cleared for landing at Federation Penal Settlement, Landing Pad Three.”

Blinking her attention back to the present, Janeway reached for the comm toggle with no conscious decision to do so, directed by instinct and habit when fatigue wouldn’t allow her much else to go on. “Janeway to Auckland Control, roger. Landing approach at one-three-one-mark-seven.”

“Roger, Janeway,” the bright New Zealand voice on the other end of the channel replied. “Enjoy your stay.”

She set about the business of guiding her slim shuttle past the island’s rugged mountains without dignifying the Kiwi’s sarcasm with a reply.

The sheer greenness of New Zealand’s North Island reached up through the clean ocean air to hug Janeway’s heart with warmth.

As temperate and mild a place as San Francisco was, it was still penciled on the coastline in shades of minty gray. Fog and rock and juniper, not mountains, trees and snow like the wild panorama galloping below her. It seemed a shame to waste such beauty on felons. No matter how hard she tried to tell herself that even criminals were humans, deserving of certain dignities and rights, she couldn’t quite divest herself of the belief that incarceration for serious crimes should be unpleasant and dull.

Why take up land that could be added to New Zealand’s magnificent National Parks system when Alcatraz still crouched in the midst of San Francisco Bay, useless to everybody but tourists and seagulls? After all, the felons sunning themselves on Auckland’s beaches right now should be contemplating how badly they never wanted to end up in prison again, not budgeting time for another stint here as though planning some kind of expense-paid vacation.

That isn’t fair, she scolded herself. They make them work here, and rehabilitation facilities like this enjoy a much higher success rate than the old-style punishment systems. Still, a deeper part of her chafed at the idea of cutting anyone else slack when she allowed so little room for error in herself.

The penal settlement accepted her clearance code without question, and she allowed the penitentiary’s flight computer to take the shuttle’s controls for the final approach and touchdown.

It felt good, actually, to sit back—even for a few minutes—and rest her brain from the endless onslaught of decisions it had been forced to make over the last few days. Mark, bless him, had been as supportive as a civilian lovemate could be, never questioning the hours she spent away from him (even when they were together), never demanding that he be more important than the things that Starfleet threw in front of her to reconcile.

Even when Bear had gotten sick, poor angel, Mark had taken her to the vet without being asked, letting the big dog ride the whole way with her head in his lap, even though it meant dun-colored hairs on his trousers for the rest of the week. Janeway knew how much he hated dealing with dog hair.

Why does everything come down at once? she asked herself with a weary sigh. A part of her still hadn’t forgiven herself for handing Bear over to the kennel this morning, still with no idea why the dog had suddenly swelled by nearly seven kilos and fallen into a persistent lazy torpor. If anything happens to her while I’m gone, I’ll hate myself.

And if anything happened to her wayward security officer because she couldn’t get Voyager out of port just one day earlier, she’d hate herself for that, too. There was just no way of winning this one.

The comp at the main gate was expecting her. Walking across the bright, open field separating the two aircraft permanently assigned to this settlement from the actual facility that housed the detainees, Janeway marveled again at the sweetness of the air, the beauty of the cerulean sky. I need a vacation, she decided. Bad timing, that. She passed inside the gates on voiceprint and retinal scan only, and wasn’t even past the second barrier before the security system informed her, “Detainee Thomas E. Paris is in the motor fleet repair bay. Would you like a security car to take you there?”

“No,” she told it. “I’d rather walk.”

It neither thanked her nor signed off; she left the gate behind without caring.

For all that they couldn’t have many visitors to the penal settlement, the detainees she passed didn’t seem particularly interested in her arrival. She couldn’t imagine that they’d known she’d be coming. More likely, the arrival of a Starfleet officer meant nothing but trouble for somebody within this facility, and nobody particularly wanted to be that somebody.

Just as well. She wasn’t in the mood to talk right now, least of all to anyone who couldn’t figure out how to keep themselves out of serious trouble, much less rescue a stubborn friend from the fire.

She found Paris on the pavement outside the repair bay, the only detainee in sight—and even then, only half so. His upper torso was hidden beneath some long, squat piece of equipment with a power coil the size of an asteroid, his shirt flung carelessly over the machine’s control console and a plasma welder flashing arrhythmically from somewhere out of sight beside him. Janeway took in the details of his assignment—the level of equipment he was allowed to use without supervision, the apparent mobility of the machine he worked to repair—and noted to herself that even the electronic anklet locked to his right foot couldn’t stop him from fleeing the island if he chose to at this moment. It could find him, wherever he fled, but it couldn’t prevent his escape.

The fact that he was still here said something about either his commitment to his own rehab, or his intelligence. She didn’t know him well enough yet to determine which it was.

Taking a breath to clear her thoughts and school the dislike from her features, she clasped her hands loosely behind her back.

“Tom Paris?” She summoned him as though only just coming up on the scene, seeing no need to surrender any advantage she didn’t have to.

Not to this kid. Not knowing the kind of stock he came from.

The flailing light under the machinery’s belly died abruptly, leaving a smear of darkness across her vision as an echo of its brightness.

Paris pushed himself out from under with a smoothness that betrayed the gliding board he must have had in place under his back, and flicked up the visor that hid his eyes as though lifting an extremely chic and expensive pair of sunglasses. Sweat sheened down the middle of his chest and across the flat plane of his stomach, and Janeway noted that his pale skin glowed just a bit too pinkly below his collar line and above his cuffs. Not used to New Zealand’s bright winter sun, then, and too proud to move himself inside when the daylight threatened to burn. That indicated a special type of stupidity, reserved for young men who felt they had something to prove but hadn’t a clue what it was.

Very like the description she’d been given before flying down to New Zealand, and not at all like his father.

“Kathryn Janeway,” she identified herself. She didn’t offer her hand, and he gave no sign that he expected it. “I served with your father on the Al-Batani. I wonder if we could go somewhere and talk.”

An odd little smile that seemed to go deeper than it should ghosted onto his face at the mention of his father. Janeway wondered what sort of thoughts moved behind an expression like that “About what?” Paris asked her, still stretched full-length on the gliding board.

“About a job we’d like you to do for us.”

He laughed—a laugh as odd and light as his smile—and tossed a hand toward the machine above him. “I’m already doing a `job,’” he explained with mock sincerity. “For the Federation.”

Attitude looking for a place to happen. Janeway had been warned, but it didn’t make her like it any more. Still, a dozen years of service had taught her well how to temper her tone and expression. “I’ve been told the Rehab Committee is very pleased with your work. They’ve given me their approval to discuss this matter with you.”

Paris studied her with eyes that held a hint of an intellect far keener than his history implied. Then he shrugged, as though dismissing everything he’d just allowed himself to think, and bounced to his feet with an easy grace that spoke volumes about the training and life he’d known before this. He faced her with arms spread, that infuriating grin laid out between them like a shield. “Then I guess I’m yours.”

Only if I decide I want you, Janeway thought back at him, her face as cool and stem as possible. And then only if I decide I need you. She didn’t have time to waste on him otherwise.

A park. The damn penal facility had a park. Janeway walked with Paris between the full, green trees, seething at the lovely solitude of the place amid these people who seemed, by temperament, ill-suited to appreciate it. Still, it was Paris who slowed to pluck an errant scrap of plastic off the walkway—Paris who detoured them around a bob of oblivious pigeons so that their conversation wouldn’t disrupt the birds.

And, all the while, he undercut the notion of his own decency every time Janeway began to think there might be something more to this rebellious boy than anyone realized. If nothing else, he was certainly a complicated young man. She wasn’t sure she wanted complicated for this delicate a mission.

“Your father taught me a great deal,” she said when one of his self-deprecating slurs laid out an overlong silence between them.

“I was his science officer during the Arias Expedition.”

Paris nodded, thoughtfully. “You must be good. My father only accepts the best and the brightest.” Surprisingly, the rancor she’d expected didn’t surface in his voice. Perhaps the worst of it only reached inward instead of out.

She followed on the heels of his reasonability before it could crumble away. “I’m leaving on a mission to find a Maquis ship that disappeared in the Badlands a week ago.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”

The easy certainty of his tone made it sound like he was commenting on the soccer scores, not a trek into the worst uncharted space.

“Really?” she prompted dryly.

He nodded again, more seriously, and even dared stealing a direct look at her face, as if to make sure she was listening. “I’ve never seen a Federation starship that could maneuver through the plasma storms.”

“You’ve never seen Voyager,” she told him, and quietly enjoyed the flash of jealous curiosity that jumped into his eyes. “We’d like you to come along.”

Bitter understanding supplanted whatever interest had started to get a foothold in his brain. “You’d like me to lead you to my former colleagues.” He wasn’t guessing, though she knew he meant it to sound that way, and the half-angry, half-mocking smile that seemed his constant companion finished the job of banishing her respect. “I was only with the Maquis a few weeks before I was captured, Captain. I don’t know where most of their hiding places are.”

“You know the territory better than anyone we’ve got.” He had to know that was true.

Whether he believed it or not, he shrugged off Janeway’s comment the way he might a drink offer during a long and boring dinner party.

“What’s so important about this particular Maquis ship?”

A fair enough question, considering Starfleet hadn’t followed any of the other hit-and-run raiders so far into their own territory.

“My chief of security was on board. Undercover. He was supposed to report in twice during the last six days.” She blinked off an unwelcome memory of the night she’d spent sleepless, waiting for her trusted friend’s last scheduled call. “He didn’t.”

Paris snorted at some personal joke she hadn’t heard. “Maybe it’s just your chief of security who’s disappeared.”

The possibility hurt, but … “Maybe.”

She gave him a moment to study whatever thoughts her proposition awakened in him, eager to shake an answer out of him, leery of frightening him off when he was the only real chance they had.

When she glanced away from the tower of distant mountains to see where his reflections had led him, she found Paris staring at her with surprising intensity. Their eyes met for just that instant, and he turned away with a mortified blush creeping up his cheeks toward his hairline.

Janeway discreetly averted her gaze, pretending not to notice.

“That ship was under the command of another former Starfleet officer named Chakotay,” she said, giving him a chance to catch up with her conversation before forcing him into an answer. “I understand you knew him.”

“That’s right.” He quirked a grin, as though remembering rowdy weekends at the Academy, or a wild first assignment with a brace of other young men.

Janeway watched him carefully. “The two of you didn’t get along too well, I’m told.”

He shrugged, laughing, and tossed his arms out as though absolving himself of all responsibility for anything this Chakotay might have claimed. “Chakotay would tell you he left Starfleet on principle,” Paris explained. “To defend his home colony from the Cardassians.” He folded both hands across his chest in beatific innocence. “I, on the other hand, was forced to resign. He considered me a mercenary—willing to fight for anyone who could pay my bar bills.

Trouble is—” He shrugged again, grinning. “He was right.”

He turned away from her, walking slowly and easily down a sun-dappled path that led nowhere, just like his life. “I have no problem helping you track down my `friends’ in the Maquis, Captain. All I need to know is—” He flicked her a look.

“What’s in it for me?”

It always comes down to that with your kind, she thought. Then, immediately, she had to admit that it wasn’t the goodness of her own heart that had brought her here to barter Paris’s freedom.

Everyone was just a little bit selfish, each in his own way.

People like Paris just made more of an art of it, that was all.

“You help us find that ship,” Janeway told him. “We help you at your next outmate review.”

“Uh-uh.” Paris waggled a finger at her, picking his leg up between them to tap at the anklet. “I get the anklet off first.

Then I help you.”

Janeway had expected this—had arranged for it already, in fact.

If the Rehab Committee wasn’t going to let their prize delinquent go, there was no sense wasting time bartering with Paris. And if Paris was ready to agree to her terms, Janeway equally didn’t want to waste time arguing with a slow-as-dirt committee about something as trivial as a detention anklet that wouldn’t serve its function anyway once they shipped off Earth. Still, all she said to Paris was “I’ll look into it.”

He rolled his eyes as though it made no difference to him, and squinted up toward the mountains as though fascinated by their whiteness.

“Officially, you’d be a Starfleet observer during the mission.”

“Observer?” True insult etched a frown into his young face.

“Hell, I’m the best pilot you could have.”

She shrugged, intentionally echoing him, and watched the fragile surface of his bravado crack and come apart again under the implied disinterest. “You’ll be an observer,” she said, more firmly. “When it’s over, you’re cut loose.”

Paris attempted a wounded sigh. “The story of my life.”

It took everything inside her not to turn her back on him and leave him here to rot in his government-paid paradise surrounded by all the rest of the losers he’d cast his lot with when he first blew off his duty more than a year before. Stepping up to him—so close he jerked a startled look at her and tried to back himself away—she took his chin in one hand and held him in place the way she would a disobedient twelve-year-old. The very childlike terror in his eyes only served to make him look even younger, even less deserving of this sacrifice or her trust.

“If a member of my crew gets hurt because you make a mistake,” she told him, very softly, “you won’t have to worry about an anklet, mister.

I’ll make sure you don’t see daylight again.”

Paris didn’t say anything as Janeway glared at him to drive her point home, didn’t say anything when she released him, didn’t say anything when she turned to walk away.

Who knows? she thought. Maybe he is trainable, after all.