by Jane
---

"And Suder said, if there weren't any women down here, I should watch out because you'd probably hit on me."

Paris turned round from sampling a vein of bright turquoise crystals that slashed across the exposed rock face.

His jaw dropped a centimetre and his eyes had gone hard. "Oh, yes? And is that supposed to be funny?"

"I thought so. I told him I didn't think you'd be any harder to fight off than Jenny Delaney." Harry swallowed. "Tom, it was a joke. At least, I thought it was a joke. . . "

"Oh. A joke. Right."

"It's only the kind of stupid thing. . . "

"Everyone says about me, I know."

"No! It's what everyone says about everyone. This morning Wildman asked me if it was true that Chakotay was seeing Neelix behind Kes's back, because. . . "

Paris suddenly started laughing. "Harry. . . Harry. . . Okay. I started that one. Chakotay was being so damn regulation about inspecting the kitchen and whether everything was cleaned in the right grade of snake oil: sometimes I think he's more Starfleet than Janeway is. I just told Bateheart it was an excuse to spend time with Neelix without Kes getting suspicious."

Harry smiled, more with relief than anything. Paris had been unusually touchy all morning.

"You ready to break for lunch?"

The lieutenant closed up his tricorder and slung it over his shoulder. "Most sensible thing you've said all day, Harry. Give me a hand down from here."

He jumped the three feet down from the ledge where he'd been working, letting Harry steady him. "Who'd have thought there could be so much of the wrong sort of dilithium in one small corner of the galaxy?" he complained, adding the samples he'd just gathered to the small heap of rock chippings that was all they had to show for the morning's work.

Harry led the way back to their base camp and started digging in the backpacks for lunch. They'd been in a hurry, and Neelix had fixed it. He pulled out the containers and hesitated.

"What's wrong?"

"When my mom fixed a lunch box for me, she always put in a surprise. I think someone must have told Neelix to keep up the tradition."

Paris grabbed one of the boxes from him. "Harry, stop feeling sorry for yourself. We're still alive. That's more than Janeway honestly expected six months ago."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, think about it. The ship was a wreck, she'd lost her first officer, her doctor, her chief engineer. All she knew she was getting from the Maquis was a good security chief and a heap of trouble. She could never have dreamed B'Elanna would be as good as she is. Even Chakotay. . . "

"She knew the commander was ex-Starfleet."

"Oh, yes. So he had to be dependable, trustworthy, competent, loyal and intelligent. Of course. Stupid me. Can't think what he was doing in the Maquis at all."

Harry gazed at Paris in despair. "What's the matter with you today, Tom?" he asked eventually.

"Nothing. Nothing's the matter."

"Chakotay is a good officer."

Paris nodded, apparently amused now by Harry's vehemence.

"Come on. He is. You know it."

"All right. He is. He is. I don't deny it. He doesn't even look at me like I'm shit like most of the Maquis."

"And he knows you're a good pilot. He gives credit where it's due," Harry continued. Paris smiled to himself. Harry always turned a little deaf in response to strong language. It was a trait that made Paris hold his tongue one moment, and want to experiment with something really foul the next. What would Harry have made of New Zealand, he wondered, where if a word didn't naturally get spelled with a line of asterixes, it was hardly worth saying.

". . . And you saved his life on the Ocampan homeworld." Harry had worked himself up into an indignant snit. "You'd think the Maquis would be grateful for that. It makes me really mad. . . "

"No, Harry."

"What?" The ensign blinked, as if he'd almost forgotten Paris was there.

"Nothing makes you really mad. That's what I like about you."

Paris sat down and peeled open his lunch box. He picked up a triangle of something between forefinger and thumb. "What do you think this is, Harry? Starter, main course or desert?"

"Tom. . . "

"Um." Paris rolled a mouthful thoughtfully with his tongue. "You know, I think it's Spanish omelette. Made with leola root rather than potato, of course, but. . . the texture is right." He looked up at Harry's frustrated expression. "Okay. It's my sister's birthday today. We always used to have a big family picnic. And absolutely no leola root omelette. I hated it, of course, but. . . they're probably doing it today. . . "

"Yeah." Harry's face dripped understanding. "I know."

Tom shook his head impatiently. "No, Harry, I don't think you know at all."

The meal continued in silence. Every few mouthfuls, Harry would swallow and open his mouth as if he was about to say something, then he'd just take another bite of candied leola loaf, or whatever.

Paris gradually slid down from sitting to lying on the cropped, dense mat of whatever passed for grass on this world. "I'm going to catch forty winks. Or twenty."

"We still have another site to survey."

"I know. Twenty minutes. In twenty minutes, I promise, I'll wake up and be the Tom Paris you know and love."

"I'll look forward to that," Harry responded a little ungratefully.

He packed the containers away then turned and looked at Paris. "I think I'll go get started. Okay, Tom?"

"Fine."

---

It was about a mile to the next site they were looking at. The ground was uneven, broken by fault lines and scoured by flash floods. It was an unfriendly place, not actually dangerous, but not easy either. Harry identified the low cliff B'Elanna wanted them to map and took an initial reading by walking along its length with his tricorder. At some point, water had flowed along the rock face and undercut it. There was frost damage too, and a small talus had built up at the foot of the cliff in some places. Harry identified the geological succession in the rocks, and then turned to see if Tom was in sight yet. He must have been here for at least twenty minutes.

His tricorder screeched. He grabbed it and stared at the readout.

"What made it do that? I thought you were being attacked by something!" Paris had broken into a run at the sound and he arrived, breathing heavily, to look over the ensign's shoulder.

Harry turned the tricorder so Paris could see the screen. "A wormhole."

"A what? How can there be a wormhole on a planet? It must be malfunctioning."

"Not on the planet, Tom. Somewhere out in space, but close by. I wonder if Voyager's seen it?"

"Harry. . . You have your tricorder set up to scan for wormholes, all the time?"

The ensign coloured. "Well, why not? It doesn't do any harm."

Paris took the tricorder out of Harry's hands. He made some adjustments. "Well, that's what it says. A wormhole. Of course, we can't tell how big, or how close."

Harry took the instrument back. "It's one or other, either big, or close. Otherwise we'd never be picking it up through the atmosphere. It's on a bearing of one nine eight. . . Tom, what direction is Voyager from here?"

The pilot frowned. "Um. . . I always lose my sense of direction the moment I beam down. Zero zero seven."

Harry began to pace up and down. "Damn. Damn."

"What's wrong?" Voyager had left reconnaisance parties on three planets in this system, all of which were promising candidates for dilithium prospecting. Tom and Harry had been the first to be dropped off, and would be the last to be picked up too, some time late that evening. It was only fair, since they'd drawn the only M class planet of the three. Voyager was carrying out her own survey of the system's asteroid belt.

"This planet might be directly between Voyager and the wormhole. If they don't notice it and get back here immediately, it might be gone before we can check it out. Or use it. . . "

"And it might lead in entirely the wrong direction, Harry."

"No. No. I think we're meant to go home, Tom. I think we're going to find a way. This could be it."

Paris frowned. "Harry. . . don't do this to yourself. It's not worth it."

"We've got to contact Voyager somehow."

"Look." The pilot gently took the tricorder away from him again. "If we're meant to get home, if that's some kind of fate that's been laid down for us, then the wormhole will go to the right place, Voyager will get back to pick us up soon enough, and everyone else -- or were you planning to go without B'Elanna, or Chakotay? -- and we'll do it. So stop fretting. We can't contact Voyager anyway."

Tom was right. All the dilithium that was lying around, even though it was the wrong kind, played havoc with subspace signals.

Harry took a deep breath. "Right. Of course. No, of course, I didn't mean we should leave anyone behind. . . "

"Let's see what else we can find out. . . Oh, I see what you've done. How many tricorders did you cannibalise to soup this one up so much?"

"All the dilithium in the area could do something to subspace, making wormholes more likely. So if this one is no good, maybe we could stay here and wait for one that's right."

"You're off and running before the starting pistol's fired again, Harry Kim. None of the dilithium we've found so far has the right crystal structure to do more than make static and look pretty in a display cabinet."

"I'm going to link up my communicator to the beacon in the emergency kit. That should be able to punch a subspace signal through to Voyager."

"Fine." Paris watched as Harry swung the kit off his back. He turned it upside down, dropping the medikit and various other essential supplies on the ground. "Shall I get on with the survey while you do that?"

"If we can get home, we won't need. . . "

"Big 'if', Harry. I'll get on with the survey."

Paris sauntered over to the cliff. He sneaked a look back at Harry and noted that the ensign was hunched over the open cases of the tricorder, the beacon and his communicator pin.

"Hm. It's all very well making them so small, until you have to get inside and make them do something else, right?"

Harry looked up. "There's something. . . something's not right here. The beacon just isn't working. It's operating, but it's not generating a subspace signal at all."

"Maybe the dilithium is damping it."

"It's as if someone doesn't want us to get home. . . "

"Harry, stop it. Stop personalising blind fate."

"Ow!" The ensign dropped his communicator and sucked the palm of his hand.

"And now your pin's turned against you. Are you okay, Harry?"

"Yeah. The power cell just. . . burst."

Paris glanced down at his own communicator and raised a hand to touch it and check it was okay.

"Don't! It'll burn through your skin if it goes up like mine did."

"Okay. What made it do that?"

"There was a subspace pulse of some kind." Harry picked the tricorder up. "Oh no. Tom, the wormhole's gone. That could have caused the pulse."

Tom stood there for a moment, debating what to say. It didn't occur to him to voice how he felt about the situation himself. "Voyager will have detected it. The pulse, I mean."

"So." Harry started tidying up the remains of his failed experiment. "It's too late. Just another near miss."

"Harry. . . Have you thought, what it would really mean, if we got home today, or any time soon?"

"Of course. . . " Kim stopped, looking as if he wished he could shoot himself. "I suppose it would mean you'd go back to prison, at least until Captain Janeway could persuade someone. . . "

"I don't think that's how the system works, Harry. The best I could hope for is that the last six months would count as part of my sentence. With my luck, they'll say the whole episode was an inspired escape attempt and give me another ten years. But I wasn't thinking about me, for once. What about Chakotay, and B'Elanna? And all the other Maquis? They were handing out ten year sentences as standard. Chakotay would probably get fifteen to twenty."

"The captain would. . . "

"Drop them off somewhere? Why would she? What's changed since we set off into the Badlands to arrest them in the first place? We always knew they weren't criminals, not in the ordinary sense."

"But. . . "

"They're our friends now? I don't think that counts for anything. They're still traitors. Starfleet's policy towards the Cardassian border isn't going to have changed. Or if it has, it's as likely to have hardened as anything."

Harry was looking, Paris thought, like a small boy who'd just been told Christmas had been cancelled and his best friend would have to give his new puppy back.

"There has to be some recognition for what they've done," the ensign protested."We wouldn't have survived without their help. Chakotay could have let the Kazon destroy Voyager right at the start."

Paris shrugged. "They'll say he was just acting in the best short term interests of his crew. Their ship was in a worse condition than Voyager."

"But. . . Tom, they want to go home. I know they do. They're working as hard as any of us to get back to the Alpha Quadrant."

"Well. . . I suppose they feel reasonably certain the Federation won't see fit to put their children in jail for seventy year old crimes. And. . . if we're not heading for home, what else are we doing? We've got to go someplace. That's as good a direction as any."

Harry tipped the boxes and tool rolls into the backpack and snapped the case closed on the tricorder.

"Well, if we're going to take the long way round, we need dilithium. Let's get on with the survey."

---

The routine had been established during the morning and it wasn't really necessary to talk, but the silence weighed heavily on Tom. Eventually, he stopped to take a pull at his water bottle, and decided to take Harry's over to the ensign.

"Thirsty?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

"See, I told you."

"What?"

"You'd like to be mad at me, but you can't do it."

"There's nothing to be mad at. I just hadn't realised what a difficult decision it was going to be. . . "

"Decision? There is no decision. If you find a wormhole that goes the right way, I know we'll take it. Captain Janeway would be letting down three quarters of her crew if she didn't. Hell, even if none of us wanted to go home, she'd go. It's her duty. She doesn't have a choice. It's not really her ship, when it comes down to it."

"I do want to go home, Tom. It's not that I don't. . . that I don't appreciate the friends I have on Voyager. I just wish we could go back and be a regular starship crew."

"Well, I wouldn't worry. Wormholes don't come along that often."

He took Harry's bottle back and slung it over his shoulder. The ensign's tricorder beeped and Paris put out a hand to stop Harry slipping off the heap of stones he was standing on. He forced a smile. "Well, there you go. I should keep my mouth shut."

"It is another wormhole. This one is directly below us."

"What? Let me look. Your programming must be screwed up. Are you sure you reconnected everything just now?" After a moment, Paris handed the instrument back to the ensign. "I can't make head or tail of it. But you're the expert, at least on Voyager."

"I'm no expert. But I do know I shouldn't be getting readings like these. It's too small, too localised, and can't happen inside solid rock anyway. My sensor settings must be wrong." Harry smiled ruefully. "These last three months, I've been telling myself there was no way Voyager could miss a wormhole anywhere near us."

"Shit, Harry, don't start assuming we've been passing one every day and we could have gone home twenty times over. Come on, let's investigate."

"Huh?"

"We're Starfleet, remember, not dilithium prospectors. Whatever's making these readings, it must be something interesting. And if we just do a little experiment now. . . " Paris made some adjustments to his own tricorder and walked backwards away from the cliff to a distance of about fifty metres. Then he walked another fifty metres parallel with the cliff before he started back. "The source is roughly six metres below ground level, our ground level," he amended, since the ground around here was anything but level, " and around fifteen metres back from the cliff face, and ten metres to your right."

Harry smiled, as Tom intended. "Do you have an excavator in your pack?"

"Nope."

"So do we start digging in from here, or go up on the top and look for a way down?"

Tom shrugged. "This isn't the kind of terrain where you get caves."

It was Harry's turn to be flippant. "Don't be ridiculous, Lieutenant. There are always caves. It's fate, like wormholes."

"Oh. Right. How do we get up the cliff?"

"It gets lower, around a kilometre along that way."

---

They were in luck. Only five hundred metres along, a stream had found its way over the cliff top, cutting a stepped gully with plenty of hand and footholds. They scrambled up with no difficulty and doubled back along the cliff top.

The tricorder readings stopped around then, but they continued to make their way to the point they'd identified.

"Here. . . Oh. Be careful."

Paris had stopped abruptly. When Harry caught up to him, he realised why. There was a gaping hole at their feet, around four metres across. Paris tested the edge, which seemed firm, and looked down. Then he took a flashlight from his belt and used that to break up the shadows. "It's around - oh, ten metres deep, I'd say. Looks like it had some kind of cap that fell in, maybe during an earth tremor."

"You mean it's artificial," Harry said warily.

"No doubt about it. It's perfectly circular, the walls are smooth and lined with a substance I can't identify, and those fragments at the bottom are definitely titanium alloy. That doesn't occur naturally."

Paris was already circling the perimeter.

"Do we wait for Voyager to get here, or are we going down now?"

"There's a ladder. The bars are a little too widely spaced, but I can manage it okay, I think."

"Shall I wait up here and cover your back?"

Paris looked up at his friend, while his feet felt for the third rung down. Harry, he decided, only missed the Alpha Quadrant when he had nothing better to do. "No, wait 'til I get down, then join me. It'll be safer to stick together."

At the bottom, he cautiously moved the fragments of the pit's 'roof'. They hadn't shattered: titanium alloy didn't do that, but it had been assembled from interlocking tiles which had simply fallen apart.

Below the debris was a concrete floor, with a central hatch. It didn't appear to be locked, but Tom estimated that it weighed at least a ton. He didn't try moving it.

"Looks like someone's capped off a mine."

"Or a missile silo," Harry suggested, stepping off the bottom of the ladder and carefully over the tiles. What's that?" He was pointing to an object the size of a phaser, that sat to one side of the hatch.

"I don't know. But it's the source of your signals. The shaft just goes right on down under this plug. I can't tell how far."

Harry had picked up the object and was turning it slowly, letting his tricorder read it. "It might be a beacon of some kind. . . "

"Not an intruder alarm?"

"Maybe. I don't think it has any sensors. I don't think it has any components I can recognise. I'm getting the strangest readings from it. Its composition seems to be. . . changing, all the time."

"Can I see it?" Paris held out his hand for the gadget. It was light, as if it was hollow, and felt unnaturally warm for metal. Its surface was polished and it was shaped like an elongated egg. At one end, its metallic appearance turned glassy by stages, until it seemed completely transparent, but peering into it, Paris could see nothing.

"Tom, it might be a weapon."

There were two slightly raised rings around the centre. Both were ridged, as if to make them easy to turn. Paris held it so that neither end pointed towards either man and rotated first one ring, and then the other.

"The tricorder isn't registering anything new."

"It's live."

"Alive?" Harry asked.

"No. Live. It's doing something. I can tell."

"The tricorder. . . "

"No. It's. . . got a buzz to it, a vibration, something."

Harry adjusted something on the tricorder and shook his head. "It doesn't register."

Paris laid the device tenderly on a clear patch of floor and began clearing the roof tiles away from where Harry had found it. "Look, it's part of something bigger, a control device may be. See, it sits in here, but there are no connections. Doesn't this look like a chart of some kind to you, Harry?"

There was a metal panel set into the floor, with a small tripod protruding from it. The ring that sat on the three legs looked just the right size to hold the device. There were alignment marks, and when Paris looked for them, he easily located the corresponding marks on the device itself. "See, it should sit there. Maybe this tells us how to operate it. . . Can you make head or tail of this?"

Harry looked at it for a moment, then turned his tricorder on it. He nodded as it confirmed what he suspected. "It's a star chart. The scale is odd. It's not linear. See, that's the system we passed three days ago, and those are the three red giants Jenny was so interested in, but as we move out from the centre, which is here, the scale shrinks really fast. I'd guess. . . I'd guess the whole galaxy could fit on this, but it's not easy to get a feel for it."

"Why would anyone need such a weird map?"

"Someone who's more interested in local places?"

"Yes, but then you just leave the far away ones off the map, don't you?" Paris ran his fingers across the map, in the direction of the Alpha Quadrant. "Harry, you know it's been six months since the Caretaker brought us here?"

"Yes?"

"To the day. If Starfleet didn't have any real reason to suppose we're still alive. . . they'll have declared us dead. Today."

Harry looked up from his study of the map. "What made you think of that?"

"Has it ever occurred to you that you could get back and find that Libby's. . . decided to give up on you? Found someone else? She could even be married to someone else."

He watched Harry putting together what he'd just said with what he hadn't.

"Tom. . . You think this thing can create wormholes? To order?"

"More likely there's a naturally occurring wormhole here and this device can control it."

"That would explain why one happened while it wasn't in place." Harry stepped forward to retrieve it, but Paris scooped it up.

"Careful. You don't want to break it," he said, with a tremor in his voice that he hoped Harry wouldn't notice.

"Yes, but. . . it might not work more than once. We won't do anything with it until Voyager gets here and we've talked to Captain Janeway."

"Mark."

"What?"

"That's the name of the guy in the picture she keeps on her desk, isn't it? They're older than you and Libby. He might have decided he didn't have time to wait."

"Tom. . . You know what I think will happen when -- if -- we get back? You're right, that the captain will have to hand Chakotay and B'Elanna and the others over to the authorities, but I bet she'll do something, put pressure on Starfleet somehow, maybe threaten to resign. They could be paroled to Starfleet the way you were. . . "

"You think either of them wants to serve in Starfleet? You think Starfleet wants them? Or me?"

"They'll work something out. If the Maquis just come back voluntarily, that will count for something."

Paris scowled. "I wish I could believe that. Why don't you see if there's any mechanism here to open the hatch?"

"Okay." Harry turned away, tricorder in hand, scanning the debris for anything interesting underneath.

"We might need rope, if we get it open," Paris said. "I'll go and get some."

"Okay." The titanium was scattering signals too much. Harry had started turning the tiles over by hand.

Paris slipped the device into his belt and climbed up the ladder, his muscles complaining about the too long intervals between the rungs. Once he was up, he took the device out again and threw it onto the ground a couple of metres from where he stood. Then he pulled his phaser and set it somewhere between stun and disintegrate. He fired. The device let out a stream of high pitched clicks.

"Tom?" Paris spun, his phaser flying out of his fingers. Harry Kim was just resting one knee on the edge of the pit. He was staring at the glowing device, and the steam rising from the rock under it.

"I'm sorry, Harry. I'm really sorry."

---

Two hours later, Harry Kim was still sitting at the lip of the shaft, his chin resting on his knees.

"I still can't believe you did that," he said without looking up, when Paris returned from another hike along the cliff top. He'd recognised that Harry didn't want his company, but he wasn't quite prepared to go off and leave him alone on an unfamiliar planet. The irony of his concern amused him. He'd probably condemned his friend to an early death in the Delta Quadrant, when Harry could have been looking forward to a reunion with his fiancee and the comparative safety of a career in warp drive development for Starfleet. It was easier to be ironically amused than to really think about what he'd just done.

"You can't believe it? Well, Harry, you're just. . . naive. I'm the Tom Paris who killed a shuttle crew and lied to avoid taking the blame. The Tom Paris who ran away and joined the Maquis rather than hang around and face up to the all the people I disappointed. . . "

"No, I can't believe it. You're not a coward. I know you're not a coward. . . "

"I'm not? Oh, I'm not afraid to die, if that's what you mean. If you're talking about when I went back and saved Chakotay. . . There was no choice. I didn't do it because I was brave, or because I thought his life was worth more than mine and I had some kind of obligation to save him. I sure didn't do it because I liked him. But can you imagine coming back from a situation like that, and saying to people, 'well, it was his life or mine, so here I am, folks'? Well, I don't have to imagine it. I've been there."

"But. . . "

"It takes a certain kind of courage to say you weren't prepared to die for something worthwhile, don't you think? Or to own up to a mistake. And it's so much easier to lie. . . or it isn't even easier. You've just done it before you even think about how difficult it's going to be. I've always done it before I could think. Sometimes it's lying to cover up, and sometimes it's jumping right into some piece of junk heroism. I just. . . don't want to face up to. . . to the people I like realising what a piece of shit I am. Okay? And I am scared to go back to prison. Too scared. It's like being buried alive, as if everyone's just nailed the coffin lid shut and walked away. Leaving you to the rats. . . "

Harry stood up, glowering. "Look, Paris, if you do have to go back to jail, I'll go to your father personally and make sure he looks at your record here and. . . "

"And he'll say it's a sham. If he'll even let you through the door."

Harry was struck dumb. He obviously couldn't conceive of a father who'd written his son off so completely. "He knows I'm a fuck-up, Harry, just like Chakotay, and Seska, and everyone else on board. You're the only one who's decided something different, Did it ever occur to you that maybe I just like picking on Ferengi?"

Harry didn't answer.

"Because this is par for the course, Harry. It's Caldik Prime, and the time I wrote off my father's flitter and rigged the computer so it would look like it had been stolen, and stealing stims from my mother's office so I could stay awake to cram for my Academy exams. . . "

"Tom, if you were this much of a mess, you wouldn't have passed the psych tests for the Academy."

It was Paris' turn to be silent. Then he cocked his head to one side. "I'm Admiral Eugene Paris's boy, Harry. They bent the rules. They made allowances."

He thought he'd won the argument, but Harry suddenly came back.

"I don't think they did. I think you've created a problem that doesn't really exist. Maybe you're not perfect and you think you have to be to satisfy. . . I don't know. . . some kind of ideal you dreamed up yourself, or maybe that your father dreamed up for you. You didn't have to go back for Chakotay. You could have told us the stair collapsed before you could reach him. We'd never have known."

Paris thought about it. His memory of the incident wasn't all that clear. The two of them had been alone, but he, Paris, hadn't. He'd had a mass of people standing behind his shoulder, waiting to see what he'd do. Janeway, and Harry, and his father. . . The impression that they'd been there was so strong, he could quite clearly remember the expressions on their faces.

Only they weren't really there. Harry and the captain were safely clear of the shaft, and his father was 70,000 light years away in the Alpha Quadrant. None of them would have known. He'd lied before, and gotten away with it. He could have gotten away with it after Caldik Prime, only for some reason he didn't understand, he'd talked in the end. He'd always attributed that to stress, to guilt messing up his instincts for self protection. It was the only time he'd ever had people sympathising with him over a situation that was entirely his own fault. In fact, it was the only time he'd ever been on the receiving end of any sympathy, period.

And maybe Janeway, and Harry, and even his father, were just the faces he put on what everyone else thought of as their conscience.

"Well. . . I'd have known."

Harry's arm slid unexpectedly round his shoulders.

"Hey, I thought you were going to have to fight me off. . . "

"Shut up, smart ass."

"You're still not really mad, are you?"

"I don't know. I'm numb. I keep wanting to tell myself it wasn't what we thought it was. It was just the door key, or something."

"I shouldn't have said that, about Libby. . . "

"It's only the truth. But I should have thought about what going back would mean for you. Tom. . . "

"Yeah?"

"If the captain really couldn't do anything, if they won't find a way out of it. . . I won't forget you. Or B'Elanna, or Chakotay. However long it is. . . "

"You'd come back from a six month tour, and tell Libby you were going to spend a chunk of your leave visiting in New Zealand?"

"Yes."

Paris nodded, trying hard not to swallow. "Maybe Chakotay and I could share a cell. At least he showers. . . "

"He might consider it if he couldn't share with B'Elanna."

Paris nodded. It was his turn for disbelief. Here was Harry, trying to make him feel better about himself. It would be nice to let someone persuade him, just for once, that there was something to feel better about.

"Thanks, Harry. When you tell the captain. . . "

"I'm not going to tell the captain."

"Oh. I am." But it wasn't so bad, really. He already knew what she'd look like, what she'd say. She'd been standing there when he'd used the phaser. Along with his father, and Harry.

"I think we should go back and look at the shaft some more. That device had to be powered by something. Maybe there's dilithium down there."

"Okay. After you."

---

The hatch turned out to be operated by a crank handle set in the wall of the shaft. It slid aside, perfectly balanced, as silent and smooth as a starship door. The interior was illuminated by a flash of blue light. Tom pulled his head back from the opening, then leaned forward again and shone his torch in. As their eyes adjusted, the two men made out a fragile, translucent structure of sheets and rods that descended another ten metres and then stopped, shattered. The walls were broken too. The whole shaft had been sliced through by a fault line.

"It's broke," Paris said.

There was another, less powerful flash, leaping a gap in a conduit.

"The shaft must be shielded somehow. We didn't read any of this. It must be storing up some kind of energy, then discharging it, and that set the device off."

Harry leaned forward and Paris caught hold of his arm."Hey, be careful."

"But it's not storing up very much before it all leaks away. That map might have been realistic once, when it worked properly, but now. . . "

"Looks like we arrived a few thousand years too late. Is there dilithium down there?"

"Mm. The wrong sort. This technology, whatever it is, can obviously use it, but. . . "

"We can't. Come on, Harry. Those lightning bolts are jumping all over. Let's seal it up again. B'Elanna can take a look when Voyager gets back."

"Right."

"Harry. . . " The ensign turned back from the handle as the hatch slid to. "Thanks."

---

End