The BLTS Archive- Shoreleave
by august (appelsini@hotmail.com)

---

cSept 99

Story Notes: This is dark. Darker than I've written for a while, so
please...you have been warned. Nothing particularly obscene or
explicit, just a nice dose of reality. Parents, watch your
children...policing them is not my responsibility.

Disclaimers: As always, Paramount owns it all. I am a mere peasant,
stealing sheep from the flock. Lyrics used from 'Reasons To Be
Beautiful' by the exquisite Hole. No copyright infringement is meant,
just mere adoration oftheir words.

--- indicates a shift in point of view and time.

---
And I weep at your feet
And it rains and rains....
---

I blame myself. When she didn't come back after her allocated time I
was actually happy. I thought she had forgotten the time. I thought,
perhaps, that she was enjoying herself.

When she didn't show up for the dinner shift at the messhall, I
noticed. It didn't set off warning sirens though, I just assumed that
she was eating planetside, or that something had come up. If I had
indulged my desire to find out where she was every time I thought of
her, I would never get any work done.

To tell you the truth, I didn't even think about her that night. There
used to be a time when I would have checked in with her by comm, or
thought up an elaborate excuse to stop by her quarters. But that night
I shot some pool, had a few drinks with Lomanski and went to my
quarters.


My comm badge went off at three that morning. I ignored the first two
buzzes, I always do. Then I stretched my arm out and banged down on
it.

"Chakotay." I said groggily, sitting up.

"Commander, I apologise for waking you, but there is a matter of some
emergency. The Captain has not returned from her shore leave."

"Tuvok?"

"It has been over fourteen hours, Commander. The Captain has not
returned."

I sat up straight. I was awake.

"Have you sent a party down to look for her yet?"

"Two." I smiled a little at his answer. The standard action would have
been one, but the old man was fond of Kathryn.

"I take it they found nothing?" I asked, pulling on my pants and
searching
for my boots.

There was a moments silence, and I imagined his silent mutterings
about the human nature of stating the obvious. "There is no sign of
her, Commander."

"Well, I'll be right there. Meanwhile, wake Seven and B'Elanna - let's
see if there is some way of getting our scanners to work in this
environment."

"Understood."


When I got up to the bridge, things were swarming. Tuvok was
organising ground teams and ordering Seven and B'Elanna. Harry was
fiddling around with the sensors, trying to configure a beam that
would break through the  atmosphere of the planet and allow us to
scan. Tom was talking about taking the Delta Flyer down to do a basic
search.

I was still trying to compute it in my head. Kathryn was gone. Kathryn
was gone.

I'll make no pretense of the fact that things between us had been
strange. After the Borg and Seven and Kashyk... well I began to
realise that perhaps I  didn't know her at all. But I had never, ever
imagined life without her. That she would one day beam down to a
planet, and I would never see her again.

But that's how it happened. That's how the great Captain Janeway of
the Federation Starship Voyager went missing. No great battle, no
intense hostage negotiations. She simply beamed down one day, and
never came back.

The first few days of the search were frantic. We had already been in
contact with the government of the planet -- and the help that they
had given us in those first few days was incalculable. Rotating away
teams from our ship had combined with their regular patrols swept the
surface of the planet. Never before had malfunctioning technology been
as infuriating as it had then. Knowing that, if not for the atmosphere
of this planet, we could have picked up her bio-signs in a second was
an immeasurably frustrating thing.

We stayed in orbit around that planet for two months. For two months
the entire crew focused their attention on Getting Our Captain Back.
For two months, the command crew lived with the illusion that we were
looking for someone who wanted to be found.

No one dared to voice it in the first few weeks. And, maybe, no one
even thought it in the first few weeks. It was B'Elanna, in all her
wisdom and grace, who finally verbalised the thought in the middle of
a briefing.

"What if we're going about this the wrong way?" She had said, staring
straight down at the table.

"How's that?" Tom turned to look at her.

"Maybe we should be searching for someone who doesn't want to be
found." She said, plainly.

In all of our conflicts and horrors, I don't think that there has been
a sentence uttered with such a devastating effect. Not the Kazon, not
the Borg - hell, nothing in this godforsaken quadrant had so obviously
wounded them all as B'Elanna's statement.

"No." Neelix said immediately. "No, that's impossible. Not the
Captain! No, B'Elanna. No."

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me. "Maybe not. Hell, I hope
I'm wrong - but Chakotay, you asked for a new approach and I'm telling
you what I think."

I looked around the room. I knew she was right. We all did.

Harry surprised me the most. Out of all the people to be indignant, I
had assumed he would be first. I keep forgetting that after five years
and a hell of a lot more than most people could handle, Harry is not
the reality virgin I first met. He spoke quickly. "B'Elanna's right.
And this would be the perfect planet for her to leave. We can't scan
down there -- anywhere else and we could pick up the human lifesign
straight away. If she was going to go..."

"...what better place than this." I absently finished off his
sentence.

The room was quiet.

"She was not happy here." Seven said, finally.

"She wouldn't leave." Neelix countered.

"She hasn't been the same since the void, Neelix. You, of all people,
know that." B'Elanna threw back at him.

"I agree with Neelix, the Captain would never abandon the ship
B'Elanna." Tom interrupted. "Christ, how many times has she tried to
go down with Voyager? She would never leave. Never."

"But it appears that she has, Ensign." Tuvok spoke, leaning forward.

Everyone turned to look at Tuvok.


Things changed after that meeting. The crew changed. On any given day
I could walk into the messhall and hear the conspiracy theorists.

"It makes perfect sense that she would wait until we were on a planet
where we couldn't scan for her."

"I hear that she had been planning to leave for months."

"I hear that she made a deal with the Borg. They took her so that we
get clear passage from Deltan space."

"She's still on board, she just went crazy. The doctor put her in
stasis."


And so our search continued, just changed a little. We sent our
informants to try and infiltrate the underground. To try and see where
a person who was hiding would go. Every day we went searching, I
became more and more convinced that she had just left the ship. We met
with more politicians, more Admirals and military tacticalists. They
informed us that while there was political unrest, it was minimal and
insular. It was not their way to involve outsiders, and anyway no
demands had been made. We made the usual inquiries, and then more so.
Nothing came of it.

Every day we searched was another day we realised that she was not
being found because she did not want to be.

And yet still we looked.


I think, in hindsight, that I would have been quite willing to stay in
that planet's orbit forever. I knew things were drawing to a close,
however, when after two long sleepless months, I was summoned into the
Ambassador's office. She was a kind woman - intelligent and
diplomatic. She welcomed me into her office with the same warmth that
she had on the many occasions we had co-ordinated the search together.

"I take it, Commander, that you have progressed no further in your
search?"

"No, we haven't."

She poured a long drink, and handed it to me. "You understand that we
have tried to help you as much as we can."

"Of course, Ambassador. Your help has been invaluable. I wish there
was some way we could-"

"-Nonsense, speak nothing of it." She picked up her glass and sipped
from it. I was waiting for the bomb she was about to drop on me. "I'm
afraid, Commander, that my government has decided to call back our
groundsmen. Our advisors have suggested that the tactical probability
of finding your Captain is minimal."

"I understand." I said, quietly.

"Yes, I suspect you do. You have a long journey ahead of you,
Commander."

"Yes."

"And you are not getting any closer by staying here, searching the
same grounds."

"Are you asking us to leave, Ambassador?"

"If it makes it easier for you to go, then yes."

I nodded, knowing the words were coming but not wanting to hear them,
all the same. "I thank you once again for your hospitality."

I stood and placed my glass on the table. I had no right to be angry
with this woman, with this government and yet I was. Part of me didn't
want to stop looking until I found ... something. Most of me, however,
knew that we would have to leave.

"Chakotay?" She called out as I walked to the door. I turned, and
waited for her to speak. "I wish I had had a chance to meet your
Captain. She must have been an amazing woman for your crew to spend so
much time searching for her."

I smiled, a little. "Yes, I used to think so too."


And so it happened that two months and six days after Kathryn Janeway
beamed down to the upper Quarter of Sion, Voyager left orbit without
her.

---

In graduate command school, we were taught hostage mentality. Although
it doesn't make good practise for Captains to indulge too much in the
what ifs of capture, it's a realisation we are imbued with as soon as
we take command.

They will always take the Captain.

I didn't see them coming, I didn't hear it. I was in the markets,
looking for a present for Neelix. It was his birthday the next week. I
felt a blow to my left shoulder, I screamed as the bones broke. I
tried to stand up as they dragged me. Stones cut my back. Someone
kicked me in the head and then I think I blacked out.

For the first few days (?) in the cell, they stopped to talk with me.
A curt, clipped language that I couldn't understand. It frustrated
them, I think, and they stopped coming. I tried to explain to them
that the communicator they had taken from me was what made my language
comprehensible. Of course they didn't understand. They started looking
at me like luggage that they didn't know what to do with. And then
they shut off the lights and just stopped coming. The food started
coming through a hole in the wall. It would drop in the darkness and I
would have to crawl on my hands and knees, feeling the floor to find
it.

It was bland and tasteless. I ate it all.

I waited for Voyager. In those early days, I waited for Voyager, for
the miraculous rescue. I did the exercises I was taught, designed
specially for capture situations. My shoulder was broken, I was sure
of it and I winced with pain each time I moved. I meditated and I
thought of them all. The isolation was worse than any torture I had
known.

And now the food has stopped coming. I don't know how long ago. A day,
maybe two. I think of the replicators on Voyager, how good it will be
to chose anything I want. To taste everything I can.
 There is no light in this room, yet I have began to notice that it is
not black. I wish it were completely black - a blanketing darkness
that doesn't keep reminding me that there is such a thing as light. I
remember a time when we freed some POWs from a Cardassian camp. They
had been kept in the dark for so long that it hurt their eyes to see
the sunlight. They cried because they hadn't seen it, and then because
it hurt to see it. And for many other reasons, I suppose.

I am so hungry and thirsty. My thoughts fly around, out of control. I
think I am probably delirious. I do not want to die here, in this
room. Why have they left me here to die?

---

It's been three years now since she went missing. The ship has settled
into a routine. Everytime we enter a new planetary system, Harry sends
an all frequencies sub-space message. Tuvok meets every delegation and
amongst the first thing he inquires about is the Captain. B'Elanna and
Seven have been working on a modified DNA scan. I don't think that any
of us believe that we will ever find her.

I'm not sure any of us believe that she wants to be found.

I occasionally - very occasionally, wonder is something did happen to
her. If she was killed, or kidnapped or... but then reality comes
flooding back and I remember that there was no body and no motive and
no demands and ...

So we all do our things to survive. And me? What habit have I
cultivated along the way? Every time we dock in a new space-port, I
find myself scanning the crowd. I'm not sure what for -- her, maybe. I
don't really believe I will find her; I'm sure she wouldn't be foolish
enough to stay on a planet where I could find her.

And I'm not sure I would know her, even if I did.

---

The End