The BLTS Archive - Feeding The Fury
by The Cat's Whiskers (thecatswhiskers01@hotmail.co.uk)

---

Disclaimer: Star Trek: /Voyager/ and all characters therein are the
property of Americans who are not me. No infringement of copyright is
intended.

This story is set approximately around Season 3-4, but no particular
spoilers other than this happens before Thirty Days.

Thanks to Star Trek /Voyager/: Lower Decks for all factual/technical
information pertaining to the layout of the USS /Voyager/, and Star
Trek: Technobabble for the correct spelling of "Jefferies Tube"

---
Chapter 1
---

Tom Paris ducked through the hatch at the junction of the upper gantry
leading to Upper Cargo Bays 1 & 2; it was quiet down here, the
semi-gloom making it positively restful, and above all, it was one
place where he could smell nothing of Neelix's slow-cooking Elbarak
Casserole. That was the trouble with the Delta Quadrant; you just
couldn't get a happy medium. Elbarak Casserole was, in fact, extremely
delicious, but unfortunately the 'active ingredient' was a
foul-smelling fungus that had to be slow-cooked for 72 hours in the
mixture...at least unless you /wanted/ to end up in Sick Bay twisting
like a pretzel in searing agony.

Still, he grinned - he had just spent an hour cleaning the warp plasma
manifolds...and couldn't be chirpier. Harry owed him monumentally for
this, and Tom had already collected by appropriating Harry's Holodeck
booking for that Alpine skiing program that was right after his own
booking. He was also going skiing, but his holodeck time was going to
be a more intimate affair. B'Elanna enjoyed skiing, true, but after a
couple of runs, Tom intended to introduce her to the real fun of
/après-ski/; roaring log fire, bearskin rug, a nice bottle of Chateau
Rothschild '79...

"It's wrong!"

He jerked back to the present from removing B'Elanna's blouse at the
cry. Tom listened intently, but heard nothing even after several
moments. He hesitated; had he imagined the noise? It was possible;
humans in silent, spooky areas like deserted cargo bays did tend to
start over-imagining things.

It had sounded like B'Elanna though and her voice had not been
scolding or chastising but.../anguished/? After listening again but
hearing silence, Tom nevertheless began to move towards Cargo Bay 1.
If there was nothing there then there was only himself to see him look
foolish, but they were forging through a completely uncharted part of
the galaxy, and all too often the little things you thought you could
ignore had a nasty habit of coming back to bite you in the ass like a
rabid Targ.

Even though he couldn't hear anything now, he cautiously made his way
along the gantry toward the Cargo Bay, ensuring he kept as quiet as
possible and hoping he was merely suffering from an over-active
imagination; but if there had been an undetected alien incursion, he
would need to sound the alarm.

Easing through the hatch of the upper left gantry, he assured himself
that he was invisible in the black shadows cast upon this section. The
shuttles were present and correct, silent and dark, as were the racks
of Neelix's supplies. There was nothing that seemed untoward but as he
strained his ears he could hear faint, indeterminable sounds.

Cautiously he checked again and saw a figure in silhouette in the
faint available light; a clearly /female/ silhouette. She moved
slightly, revealing her profile - B'Elanna. Tom moved forward
instinctively at her strange stance but stopped dead as a shadow moved
and he saw that B'Elanna was /embracing/ someone.

Taller than her; too deep in the shadows to identify; B'Elanna was
once again anonymous as she and the man kissed passionately. For some
reason Tom found himself unable to make his legs move and vaguely
realised he was in shock; there could be no mistake, not when blobs of
hands cupped her buttocks to pull her against the larger shadow in an
unmistakable gesture of carnal intent and when she responded with that
characteristic Klingon growl-purr of pleasure that she vocalised
during their love-making. Tom was aware of a buzzing in his ears and a
tiny, ignored voice warned that he could well fall off the gantry if
he didn't get it together.

Abruptly however, the shadow convulsed and B'Elanna pulled away, back
towards the doors, raising both hands to grip her hair in agitation.
"We can't go on like this! It's wrong and you know it. We have to
stop."

"No," Chakotay moved forward, catching her arm, his face an abstract
of harsh planes and angles in the dimness. His voice was tight with
strain, "I need you."

"Chakotay," she half-sobbed his name, "You think I don't? But..."

"Tom is my /friend/; do you think I don't hate myself?" Chakotay
almost snarled the words but then he pulled her against him, fisting
one hand in her hair as he kissed her ravenously, making her hiss with
pleasure as he fondled her breast with the other. "But I need you too
much...B'Elanna...now, in the shuttle, like last time - I need to
taste you, to be inside you..."

She swayed towards him but pulled herself back, "I'm supposed to be in
engineering, Vorik will be coming looking any minute...but soon...I
want you, Chakotay..."

Part of Tom realised he was very lucky to land without breaking one or
both of his legs as he simply vaulted the gantry rail and hit the
Cargo Bay floor, but they were too startled to react and by then he
was on them; he dimly heard B'Elanna cry out as he flung her aside and
Chakotay wasn't fast enough to deflect the blow that broke his jaw.
Tom gave him no quarter as he stumbled back, raining down blows with
fists and feet again and again and again until sheer exhaustion left
him panting and shaking above Chakotay's body. His hands throbbed and
as he looked at them he realised they were a deep red colour. Chakotay
lay unmoving, his features unrecognisable, his body battered to pulp.
B'Elanna was kneeling a few feet away, her chalk-white face spattered
with a few droplets of blood, staring at Tom with horror.

A soft hiss impinged on his awareness and he came to himself to find
that he was alone; the Cargo Bay doors were just closing. Chakotay and
B'Elanna were both gone, and he was still standing on the gantry.

---
Chapter 2
---

. . .  "/the proof of the pudding is in the eating!/" Tom, Harry,
B'Elanna, and Chakotay chorused the punch-line of the joke together to
Neelix.

As the Talaxian hurried back to the kitchen as more hungry crewmembers
came into the Mess Hall, Tom laughed along as he ate his Jbalian
fudge-cake, silently almost admiring the treacherous pair. Not by the
flicker of an eyelash had they betrayed themselves - it was almost
enough to make him doubt what his eyes had seen, except that his
imagination would never conjure up any image of B'Elanna in the carnal
embrace of another man.

Chakotay's life /belonged/ to him, what if he was to simply /order/
the bastard to commit suicide? It wasn't enough. He didn't want
Chakotay to take the tragically noble way out of this, destroyed by a
doomed love that could never be, he wanted to break every bone in the
man's body and drop his bloody pulp of a corpse at B'Elanna's feet.
Let's see how much she had the hots for Chakotay /then/. . .

/The proof of the pudding/. . . the phrase echoed in his head and he
veiled his eyes by lowering them to the confection on his plate. That
was the necessity if he was to expose their betrayal, their treachery.
. . his lover and his supposed friend. It was his word against theirs
and a vehement accusation of their adultery would play right into
their hands. All they had to was deny everything, and Tom Paris would
be the scorned obsessive villain of the piece. B'Elanna could leave
him in 'offence' and after letting things lie a few weeks the pair of
them could come together openly and pass it off by making jokes about
how they would never have realised their attraction if it weren't for
'that loser Paris'.

What was it they used to do in the old gumshoe movies? Incriminating
photographs - but not possible in this instance. The only person
aboard who had a holographic imager was the Doctor, understandable
since neither the Starfleet crew nor the Maquis had had any intention
of taking souvenir snaps of their quick trip through the Badlands.
Asking the Doctor to borrow it so he could obtain evidence against his
unfaithful lover was out, and replicating one would be a waste of
rations.

But suddenly Tom felt a tiny surge of doubt. He looked at B'Elanna's
beautiful face and Chakotay grinning as they teased Harry about being
Buster Kincaid, Captain Proton's sidekick. Was he about to destroy
everything by over-reacting? Was it possible he had misinterpreted
what he'd seen? Maybe B'Elanna and Chakotay had just suffered a
moment's weakness that wouldn't be repeated? Maybe he should think
things through. . .

No - his anger surged anew, more powerfully than before. B'Elanna and
Chakotay had betrayed him. Were betraying his love and his trust, and
they were going be begging at his feet for mercy before he was
finished with them!

---
Chapter 3
---

Tom hissed with the pain, mentally castigating himself as he realised
he was so wound up that he'd bitten his lower lip hard enough to draw
blood. Running his tongue over the tiny wound he again checked the
time index on the //Voyager// computer's wall display. It was 5.27
minutes since he'd left Holodeck 2 and whatever he decided he
shouldn't be standing in this main corridor where he could be seen by
any crewmember who passed by! Glancing around to ensure nobody was
imminently approaching, he quickly opened the hatch into the Jefferies
Tube and climbed inside.

All he had to do was climb up the ladder and take the first left and
it would take him straight to hydroponics. Yet again, however, Tom
found himself torn by indecision.

If B'Elanna and Chakotay were having an illicit affair, they would
have secret rendezvous. Extremely good secret meetings, considering
that apparently nobody on /Voyager/ was yet clued in that anything was
going on despite the fact that around this place there was usually a
time lapse of about 2½ minutes between someone having a secret and the
farthest corner of deck 15 knowing all about it.

In the week since what he had witnessed in the Cargo Bay, he had
endured a constant see-saw of emotions, but rage had been paramount,
the one thing Tom had been unable to get past. His sleep was tormented
by fragmented dreams of B'Elanna and Chakotay together and every
second at the Con was an eternity of endurance as he constantly
battled the urge to simply swing around in his chair and smash his
fist into Chakotay's jaw. Being the Con Officer meant that everyone
else on the Bridge was situated 'behind' you, but he had known
whenever Chakotay had moved anywhere near him because his skin had
literally crawled with prickles of fury. He couldn't go on like this -
something had to give and if he wasn't careful, it would be him. He
had to know, for sure.

It had taken Tom hours of almost second-by-second comparison of
Chakotay and B'Elanna's respective duty rosters to locate two 'windows
of opportunity' wherein Chakotay and B'Elanna would be able to each
sneak a few minutes away from their respective duty stations. But the
first window had been a living hell, since it had occurred right in
the middle of Tom's duty shift. At the Con he had felt physically sick
as Chakotay walked off the Bridge and it had taken all his willpower
to carry out the simplest of his station's functions. Fortunately the
duty shift hadn't consisted of anything more complex than piloting
/Voyager/ in a straight line at Warp 8, since that region of space had
been devastated by a super-nova at some point and anything either
interesting or useful had been obliterated. What planetary bodies had
survived intact had been flash-fried into barren lumps of rock; no
vegetation, no water, no useful minerals or ore or sentient species
had survived the destruction.

This was the second window of opportunity that the two of them could
utilise - in theory. Tom realised that he had probably wasted another
five minutes stood here in the gloom of the Jefferies Tube dithering,
but. . . an almost minute-by-minute check of the /last/ 'window' had
shown that Chakotay had gone to the Mess Hall and stayed there, while
B'Elanna had never left engineering. But there had been sudden
fluctuations in the plasma coils that B'Elanna had sorted out. What if
they had some prearranged code that they exchanged if they were forced
to cancel an assignation at short notice?

However, on this occasion the timing was perfect - as was their mutual
proximity to an ideal place for a rendezvous with your illicit lover:
hydroponics. Easily the most boring place on board (plants were not
the most riveting conversationalists and there was no way to make
turnips a fascinating subject of debate), hydroponics was never
frequented by anyone other than Neelix and occasionally his
goddaughter Naomi in 'little chef' mode. Deserted and with plenty of
shadowed nooks and crannies. If /Tom/ had been cheating on B'Elanna,
it was the rendezvous /he/ would have chosen.

But when he'd left Holodeck 2 ten minutes ago, the computer had
confirmed that Chakotay was on Deck 4, nowhere near hydroponics, which
meant that checking hydroponics was a wild goose chase. But Tom
couldn't overcome the urge to go and have a look for himself, just to
make sure, even as he acknowledged his own paranoia. However, it would
be another three weeks before their three duty rotas - his, B'Elanna
and Chakotay's - were 'synchronised' like this again where he could
monitor another 'window of opportunity', and also where Harry's duty
rota kept him out of the way.

Intending to double-check Chakotay's whereabouts, Tom tapped his chest
in auto-reflex, but of course nothing happened. That galvanised him
and he began to climb up the Jefferies Tube, grunting softly with
effort despite his gym workouts/competitions with Lt Walter Baxter. He
had booked an hour's Holodeck time commencing at the end of his duty
shift. Since Harry would be on the Bridge for another couple of hours
yet, Tom had had an excuse not to run /Captain Proton/, instead
selecting a generic, basic Alpine skiing program that he had been able
to leave running on its own. The big bad of leaving behind his com
badge on the Holodeck so a the computer would register /him/ as being
in the Holodeck while he made a discreet exit to come down here had
been a calculated risk. He could only hope that the Delta Quadrant's
next batch of whatever bad guys didn't decide to launch an attack
within the next three quarters of an hour until he could go back and
retrieve the badge.

He found the entrance and began to crawl along the Jefferies Tube. All
he had to do was check out hydroponics and once his own paranoid eyes
saw there was nothing there, he could relax. It was unlikely that
Chakotay would be able to come up with any plausible reason to go from
Deck 4 to Hydroponics in the space of ten minutes.

Swallowing against a suddenly dry throat, Tom looked at the hatch that
opened out onto the upper workman's gantry. Carefully he eased it open
and wriggled through, but didn't stand up. Unlike the Cargo Bay, the
only other access to this high gantry was via a ladder situated just
inside the hydroponics bay doors, clearly visible to any casual
glance. Apart from this small square footage of space, shadowed by a
bulkhead, most of the gantry was bathed in bright light and was
composed of a nastily echoing metal. Unless he was careful he might as
well take out five minutes on Neelix's /Good Morning Voyager/ to
announce his presence.

Crouching down, Tom stretched his body forward so he was lying on his
stomach on the gantry, and peered down at the assorted flora. True to
his guess, the hydroponics bay seemed singularly deserted of
personnel; understandable unless you found the growth cycle of
cucumbers riveting. He couldn't see anyone, but trying to determine
anything by relying on his ears was an exercise in futility. The hum
of the artificial solar emitters for the green plants was constant, as
was the soft bip-bip of the humidity gauges and the soft sh-sh of the
moisture sprinklers on the seed beds. Relatively speaking hydroponics
was as noisy as the Bridge; Chakotay and B'Elanna could be declaiming
their lust for each other at a decibel level close to that of a
Klingon aria and he might not be able to hear them.

Using his elbows and hips - how did frontline female military
personnel do this without bruising vital anatomy? - Tom crawled
forward over the metal slats of the gantry walkway to get a better
view of the room below, but it seemed genuinely deserted. . .

Wait, a flash of colour? Red? Tom risked raising his head slightly and
having another look. . . Neelix was experimenting with edible
flowering plants - those roses were peach. . . the geraniums were
pink. . .  but red?...

They were in a slight alcove right at the back of hydroponics,
shielded by luxuriant date-palm type miniature trees that effectively
screened them off from anyone who might decide to walk in and get an
eyeful as they passionately embraced - but not anyone who was looking
/down/, say from the workman's gantry.

B'Elanna pulled back and stood up jerkily, almost hugging herself
self-protectively. "I need to get back to engineering; I'll be
missed."

Chakotay moved to grasp her upper arms with his own hands, "Just one
more minute." He ordered/pleaded.

They kissed once more, lingeringly, before jumping apart guiltily as
the moisture sprinklers beeped to indicate a change in setting. Tom
flattened himself against the walkway of the gantry until he was sure
they were both gone, before sitting up. Moving rapidly he crawled back
through the Tube and down the shaft, going so fast that he banged his
shins on the ladder rungs and was panting heavily by the time he
managed to get out and get back to Holodeck 2, which had seven minutes
of the program left to run. Hurrying inside as he heard the voices of
Lt Ayala and Ensign Gerron, who had booked it next, Tom scooped up his
com badge and attached it back to his uniform in the customary upper
right section of his torso.

So now he knew.

---
Chapter 4
---

Chakotay had no time to react as Tom shoved him in the small of his
back; he stumbled forward into the airlock and Tom hit the override
commands even as the door shut behind him. Chakotay didn't even have
to time to realise what was happening as the outer hatch opened and he
was sucked into the vacuum of space.

". . . and after she assimilated me the Borg Queen jumped my bones and
we had mad, passionate sex on the floor of the Borg Cube."

Tom snapped back into it as his mind processed what had just been
said. "What?"

"That's /my/ line," Harry Kim scolded from where he was sat across
from Tom in the Mess Hall. "A minute ago when I said I'd converted to
neo-Fascism and you were to henceforth address me as Mein Fuhrer, you
said, "Okay." After that when I explained how I was really Count
Dracula and I was about to sink my fangs into your jugular and drain
you as dry as a Ferengi's generosity, you went, "Mmm." Call it
intuition if you will, but somehow I had this feeling you weren't
listening to a word I said."

"Sorry, Harry, I was. . . daydreaming."

"You hid it well," Harry retorted with droll sarcasm, ". . . and no,
you're not."

"Not what?"

"Making any more upgrades to the Delta Flyer yet; I can see new warp
nacelles floating in your eyes. The way you coo and drool over that
thing it's a good job B'Elanna's an engineer and equally as
interested, else she'd be jealous."

Tom felt his fingers twitch and had to consciously unclench their grip
from his spoon before he snapped it in half. B'Elanna wasn't jealous
of the Delta Flyer, she didn't have /time/ to be and certainly not the
/energy/ when she had two men f-

"Tom!" Harry clucked his tongue as his friend looked likely to drift
off into dreamland again. "Look, I'm your best friend and like all the
greatest sidekicks I know the importance of knowing when to leave the
hero to his brooding. Of course your ugly mug has also got no chance
against the fact I'm taking Megan Delaney to Maui in five minutes on
Holodeck 1, so I'll leave you and the Flyer alone. Just try to
remember and eat your stew before it gets cold. /Aloha/." Grinning at
Tom's glare, Harry left the table and exited the Mess Hall with a
jaunty wave.

Tom looked at the dish of Elbarak stew, and laid down his spoon,
feeling suddenly sick. He had no wish to be reminded of what had
happened on the day he'd sought to escape the cooking of this dish, it
was there every time he closed his eyes along with that touching scene
in hydroponics. It was a pity he couldn't split himself in two - half
of him was wailing in anguish, wanting to throw himself at B'Elanna's
feet and beg her not to leave him, whilst the other half was consumed
by a murderous rage that relished in fantasising ever more brutal ways
to kill Chakotay so the half-breed whore would be cowering at his feet
begging him to take her back.

He didn't /want/ to shove Chakotay out of an airlock. He didn't want
to exhaust his phaser's energy cell by emptying shot after shot into
the man. Those things were too. . . distant. He wanted. . . the
meteorological term was an 'impact event'. . . he wanted to feel the
impact-shock of pleasure that would travel up his arm as he smashed
his fist into Chakotay's face, then did it again and again. He wanted
to feel the man's bones break when his boots made contact with
Chakotay's ribs, he wanted the man battered and bloody at his feet.

He also didn't want to spend the rest of his life in the brig. Tuvok's
faults did not include inefficiency and unintelligence and anyone with
a passing acquaintance of the heavy Paris & Chakotay 'history' would
not find it a quantum leap to determine a likely suspect for
Chakotay's murder. If he did just cut the man down where he stood, he
would be buried under a pile of Security Officers before he could take
a step and there was an outside chance that Chakotay would survive
even a close-range kill shot, or at least that the Doctor would manage
to pull off the best resurrection since Lazarus.

Either way, all /B'Elanna/ had to do was scream and cry and deny
everything; it would be her word against Tom's about her affair. It
would take everyone all of ten seconds to compare diligent, dedicated,
hard-working Chakotay with cowardly, treacherous drunk Tom Paris and
pick who they believed the most. On deep space missions that lasted
long periods of time from home, Starfleet Captains possessed the legal
right to execute a felon for specific high crimes such as treason,
mutiny and murder. If /Voyager/'s current predicament didn't qualify as
the ultimate deep space mission nothing would, and murdering one of
the ship's Senior Command Staff technically carried a maximum sentence
of death. Starfleet Regulations stated that he could be 'executed by
firing squad on the vessel's Bridge', a gruesomely public end designed
to impress on other malcontents the dangers of getting ideas above
your station.

Even if Captain Janeway /didn't/ go for that option she could
superficially decide on the 'clemency' of life imprisonment. It would
be quite a while before people began to comprehend the subtle cruelty
of forcing Tom Paris to spend the next sixty years or more living in a
ten foot by ten foot square cell separated from any and all human
contact by an energy barrier that never needed to be shut off. Each
cell had sonic shower and latrine facilities and they could simply
beam food and other items into and out of his cell, including the
Doctor, who was impervious to attempts to take him a hostage.

There was a soft clunk and Tom looked down in irritation; he'd been
nervously fiddling with his com badge to the extent he'd pulled it off
his uniform. Reattaching the com badge he picked up the dish of now
congealed stew preparatory to throwing it in the vaporiser when he
paused as a thought struck him. Deliberately this time, Tom removed
his com badge and looked at it in the palm of his hand as an idea
began to germinate.

What he needed was an alibi, a way to be at Place A when the computer
said he was at Place B, but it was too risky for many reasons to be
without his com badge for longer than a few minutes at any one time;
not for nothing was one of Starfleet's most stringent regulations and
most severely punished infractions that of not having your com badge
on your person or in your immediate vicinity at all times.

But the traitorous love birds had shown him the way; like a good
little Starfleet toy Chakotay had been wearing his com badge in
hydroponics, so what Tom needed to do was figure out how Chakotay had
fooled the computer without having to resort to Tom's own risky
strategy of abandoning his com badge on the Holodeck. That way he
could lure Chakotay somewhere nice and quiet to dish out a fatal
lesson in the perils of infidelity with the computer providing cast
iron confirmation that he was on the other side of the ship at the
time.

Closing his fist around the badge, he left the Mess Hall with a jaunty
smile, to the relief of Neelix who had been concerned about his
friend's previous grimness.

---
Chapter 5
---

"Aagh!"

"Chakotay!" Tom uttered the cry as he stumbled, managing to place a
boot in the man's stomach as he artfully fell into the wall but just a
little too hard for comfort, "Oomph!"

"Commander! Tom! Chakotay! Lt Paris! Are you alright!"

Neither man was momentarily able to answer the cacophony of
simultaneous exclamations as various concerned people converged on
their position. Assuring Harry that he was only winded, Tom turned
around, his attitude the very verisimilitude of apologetic concern,
though inwardly he bubbled with vicious glee. It had taken several
minutes of inconspicuously loitering with intent before Chakotay had
got a hot drink from Neelix and Tom was able to accidentally 'hurry'
towards the Mess Hall exit too fast and crash full into the man. Even
as Chakotay painfully got to his feet, the skin of the hand holding
his stomach was blistering from the scalding coffee.

"Where's the fire, Paris?" Chakotay wheezed, scrunching up his face in
pain.

"Chakotay -"

"No harm done," Chakotay waved away their concern.

"Your hand," Tom pointed out with faked solicitousness.

"It'll only take a minute in sick bay. It's alright, Tom."

Tom managed to make a solo getaway as Harry, in full Ensign Eager
mode, whisked Chakotay off to sick bay to get the burn tended to. Once
in the corridor, however, his sheepish expression dissolved into one
of flinty anger. The few seconds of spiteful satisfaction gained from
his actions had gone leaving a hollow feeling of discontent. Chakotay
hadn't even given him the pleasure of overreacting to the incident
with harshness thus allowing Tom to go into his 'martyred innocent'
routine.

He entered his quarters, locking the doors behind him moodily and
flung himself on the couch, glaring at the computer on the coffee
table and angrily wanting to throw it against a wall. He had tried
long into the night for days to winkle out just /how/ Chakotay had
pulled off his 'in two places at once' stunt to no avail. He growled
in frustration; it was so hard to batten down his rage all the time.
It took all his willpower just to be civil to Chakotay. It was a good
job that he rarely had occasion to interact with Crewwoman Jurot, as
/Voyager's/ last surviving Betazoid would be able to pick up his
homicidal impulses a parsec away at this rate.

He activated the diagnostic/search program again in irritation,
consigning Jurot to. . .

Tom hesitated as he was about to press a command key, a memory
resurfacing in his mind, of another Betazoid crewmember, Lon Sudor.
Unlike Jurot and the late Lt Stadi, /Voyager's/ original Helmswoman
inadvertently killed by the Caretaker, Sudor had been Maquis, which
was why his incomplete medical files contained no warning of
psychopathic neuropathy. In a way, Seska's invasion of /Voyager/ had
been the best thing that ever happened to Sudor, allowing him to die a
hero's death instead of being confined to the brig for seventy years
as a murderous nut-job.

Tom stared at the program waiting patiently on the screen to be
reactivated. Betazoids were telepaths and empaths, but they could also
/transmit/ as well as receive. Tom shook his head irritably - fanciful
nonsense, Jurot had no beef with him, and if she had why wait for four
years to begin some game of slow torture?

Nevertheless, he leaned forward and on impulse, carefully began to
change the program's diagnostic and search parameters. . .

---
Chapter 6
---

"That's it!" Harry gripped Tom's upper arm with undue firmness and
began to pull him along.

"What? Where are we going?"

"Sick Bay!"

"Why? What's wrong?"

Harry stopped abruptly. "You tell me. For the past week you've been
away with the fairies! I have to ask you the simplest questions twice;
two days ago Buster Kincaid was brutally murdered by Chaotica because
Captain Proton forgot to show up in time to save his faithful sidekick
-"

"I said sorry!"

"That's not my point." Harry chided him. "People are starting to
notice that you're distracted. On the Bridge you're the very model of
decorum and we're all bored stiff by it. It's got to the point where
Chakotay is deliberately trying to get a rise out of you just to get a
reaction and the Captain's worried enough to sit there and let him."

"That's ridiculous."

"No, it's not." Harry contradicted. "You're body's present and correct
but your brain is AWOL. B'Elanna says it's like talking to a ghost and
you haven't tried to grab a quick grope in engineering for a week.
She's starting to get paranoid that you've found someone else."

/Wouldn't that be the biter bit/? Tom momentarily shut out Harry's
scolding prattle by concentrating his focus on a familiar image before
his Mind's Eye, a fantasy of him killing Chakotay. At once he was
infused with sweet rage, an almost distilled fury.

Tom knew what to do now, and more importantly, how to do it. It was
time to stop planning and take action. He cut off Harry's diatribe,
"Harry, I'm fine. I'm not going to Sick Bay. Everything will be all
right, you'll see."

Harry sighed and looked mutinous, but when push came to shove, he
mostly gave ground to Tom's wishes, and this was no different.
Muttering under his breath, he accompanied his friend and before long
Tom had chivvied him into a good mood.

---
Chapter 7
---

"Tuvok?" Captain Janeway queried.

"A Class J Nebula, Captain," Tuvok responded with his perpetual calm,
"Nothing of interest."

"Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt," Chakotay muttered the old
Earth saying at sufficient volume to raise a titter, most delighted as
always when his Captain grinned at the pun.

Tuvok raised an eyebrow but instead said, "However, there is a lot of
ion activity at the leading edge of the nebula that it would be
prudent to avoid."

"Right," Chakotay agreed, "Tom alter our heading by 10.7 -" the ship
moved slightly under his feet as with a casually airy "'Aye'" of
acknowledgement, Tom flawlessly put them on the new heading that
Chakotay had wanted. . .

. . . and hadn't had the chance to finish requesting. They continued
on for several minutes - ten, twenty, thirty. This section of space,
however, seemed to be the epitome of cosmic /déjà vu/. It contained
nothing they hadn't already seen and nothing of use in sufficient
quantities to make a detour worthwhile.

But Chakotay was extremely nervous, and he knew it had nothing to do
with what was outside the ship. He was half-convinced that Tom Paris
was becoming part-Betazoid. Either that or some freaky psychic link
was forming between them. Paris seemed hyper-aware of his every twitch
and for the past half-dozen duty shifts had demonstrated an accurate
anticipation of Chakotay's wishes that had gone through uncanny to
downright scary. Chakotay exchanged a glance with Captain Janeway and
her eyes showed her agreement; at this rate he would only need to
flick one eyelash and Tom Paris would be implementing his commands
before he'd even thought them.

At the helm, Tom Paris smiled in the knowledge none of those behind
him could see his savage grin. /Come on, Chakotay/, he formed the
thought clearly in his head, letting the anger flood unchecked through
veins and sinews, /all I need is for you to come a little bit closer.
I've had enough; damn the brig, damn Captain Janeway and her execution
permissions. I'm going to hit you hard enough to snap your neck right
here and right now. . . come on, get up and walk up behind me. . ./

At that moment, Tuvok spoke, his voice incredibly carrying perhaps a
hint of pleasure at having something of faint interest to report,
"Captain, I am detecting a faint anomalous energy signature in the
vicinity of /Voyager/."

"Source?" the Captain asked.

"Indeterminable." Tuvok checked his instruments, "It is extremely
faint and intermittent. . . it is highly unlikely to be anything more
than spatial background noise."

"Still. . . " she mused. "Chakotay?"

"Is it in visual range?" Chakotay asked.

"Affirmative," Tuvok changed the angle of the view screen, but there
were only stars ahead.

"Magnify." Chakotay stood up and moved a few steps forward, but there
was still nothing to see. "Try maximum magnification." He stepped
forward again and to one side, so as not to make Tom uncomfortable by
breathing down his neck -

Tom suddenly surged up out of his chair and lunged past Chakotay,
shouldering the other man aside; he slammed his hand down on the
console and the pulse wave activated; the ship didn't jolt but the
flash of the pulse momentarily blinded everyone on the Bridge
including even partially Tom who had had his eyes closed the entire
time.

Not to worry, he had integrated an automatic Force 7 containment field
into the pulse wave command to form around his calculation of the
alien's position, and hopefully. . .

"Intruder alert," announced Tuvok as if delivering the weather report,
ignoring his own teary eyes and smoothly aiming his phaser at the
left-hand vertical rim of the view-screen, where a suddenly visible
tall, leathery-skinned alien creature hissed malevolently at Paris.

It looked vaguely like an alligator on legs; Tom didn't give a damn as
he aimed his own phaser at it. His though, was set to 'kill'.
"Gotcha!"

"What are you?" Captain Janeway demanded of the creature sharply,
outwardly unfazed by the sudden turn of developments on her Bridge.

It hissed again, ignoring her utterly as its angry eyes glared at Tom.
"You managed to expose me, then. How extraordinary for such a
primitive being. . . "

"You did it to yourself," mocked Tom, his phaser never wavering,
"You're some kind of emotional /vampire/. You project hallucinations
to provoke extreme emotions in your victims and then feed off those
feelings."

"Close enough," the alien agreed, "though I find it incredible that a
species as backward as yours could have seen through my hunting
mechanism."

"Well a word of advice for future reference," Tom retorted, "arrogance
and stupidity are not a good combination."

The creature hissed again, spittle gathering at the corners of its
mouth as it snarled in rage; it was toothless with vestigial gums,
indicating that its species probably only 'ingested' emotions, instead
of feeding on physical nutrients.

Ignoring the display, Tom goaded, "Me seeing B'Elanna and Chakotay
together in Cargo Bay One enraged me beyond reason; liked that didn't
you? But your little attempt to feed my fury in hydroponics overplayed
your hand."

"Lt Paris, explain?" Captain Janeway demanded.

"Long story short, Captain: this. . . creature. . . knew I was
checking on B'Elanna and Chakotay, so it projected a hallucination of
them together in hydroponics. But your hallucinations had com badges
on, and I'd already checked with the computer that Chakotay was on
Deck 4 at the time," Tom taunted the alien, "once I started /thinking/
instead of /reacting/ it was obvious that either Chakotay had come up
with an undetectable way to fool the computer as to his whereabouts -"

"Unlikely," Tuvok commented with no discernible concern over the
current situation.

"- or else what I'd seen /wasn't/ real." Tom ignored the interruption
as he focussed his whole attention on the alien. "Which made me start
to wonder who or what could want me in such a state of uncontrolled
fury? Once I started fantasising about ever more brutal ways to kill
both of them for their adultery I realised someone was trying to
artificially magnify my feelings of rage and vengefulness. Could that
someone have also /instigated/ them? Crewman Jurot is now the only
living Betazoid on /Voyager/ to generate those kind of empathic
impulses, and since she's no Lon Sudor, that someone was far more
likely to be some kind of alien intruder."

"Similar to that telepathic pitcher-plant thing," muttered Harry.

"Very clever," sneered the alien. "Pity, your rage was truly immense
in magnitude when you believed your mate was faithless to you with the
other male of your kind. You would have been delicious and nourishing
for many days. Still, perhaps we'll see another time. . . "

"I don't think so." Tom denied flatly. "You see, there's an extremely
important difference between me and him," he gestured towards Chakotay
with his free hand without ever taking his eyes off the creature,
"that you /didn't/ take into account. You see, as soon as I actually
thought about it, I knew what I was seeing had to be fake, because
Chakotay has a lot of pesky principles and ethics that often make him
very irritating. . . but which also stop him being a liar and a cheat
and a traitor." He raised the phaser to point directly at the alien's
head, his eyes turning to chips of pale blue ice set in a hard-jawed
face, "Chakotay is a man of honour and integrity, while I on the other
hand am a lying, cheating, unscrupulous, amoral bastard who has no
qualm about simply killing you - /right now/."

"Tom!" Janeway exclaimed.

The alien's eyes widened as it hissed and jerked to one side in
anticipation, but Tom just smirked as it collided with the containment
field barrier and was halted. As he had intended, it was just one
giant fish in a barrel.

"Captain," Tuvok declared, "I believe emitting a high-resonance
Polaron pulse on wide-spectrum dispersal would be sufficient to drive
the alien entity from within the ship." He paused and then added with
perhaps just a soupcon of warmth in his voice, "It would, however
cause the entity considerable physical pain in the process."

"Tom," Chakotay urged quietly, his tone strangely pleading, "you're
better than this."

"'Considerable physical pain'?" Tom repeated the phrase slowly.

"Indeed," Tuvok confirmed. "I would categorise it as probably
excruciating."

For an eternal heartbeat nobody moved; Tom found his whole focus had
narrowed down to his finger on the phaser's fire button. All he had to
do was twitch, but. . .  "I can live with that," he decided, smiling
cockily at the alien.

As the words left his mouth, Captain Janeway made a gesture and Tuvok
pressed the command key. Another flash enveloped the bridge and the
alien let out a high-pitched shriek of rage and pain before it
abruptly disappeared.

Tom realised that his arm was trembling and then a bronze hand plucked
the phaser from his own freckled one and turned it off. His eyes a
mystery, Chakotay handed the phaser back and stepped away as Tom
automatically grasped the object, consciously absorbing for the first
time that he had been about to simply cut the creature down regardless
of whether it was armed or not.

As if the action had been silent permission the Bridge tableau was
broken. Seven stepped forward, "I will re-modulate /Voyager/'s shields
to continuously emit a low-level Polaron particle wave whilst we
traverse this sector. They should be unpleasant enough to repel any
more of the entity's species who might otherwise consider /Voyager/'s
crew to be a food source."

---
Chapter 8
---

The atmosphere in the senior staff conference room was tense,
bordering on the uncomfortable.

Tom had briefly described what he'd seen and how, once he'd realised
an undetected alien was generating the hallucinations to provoke an
extreme emotional reaction, he had come up with a plan to snare the
entity. He explained how he'd been concerned as to just how much the
alien could 'read' him and so had not brought his suspicions to anyone
else, passing off the scalding incident in the Mess Hall as a genuine
accident caused by his distraction as to how to best counter the
infiltration by an invisible enemy. Tom related how he'd deliberately
broadcast his 'intent' to kill Chakotay there and then to lure the
alien to the Bridge so as not to miss the bumper feast of emotions
that would be unleashed by such an attack; he'd activated the
confinement field pulse from the Con while the alien was off guard,
expecting him to jump up and attack Chakotay instead.

The uptight body language of those assembled was thus perfectly
understandable, but Captain Janeway decided it was best to move things
along rapidly. "Seven, was the Polaron wave effective?"

"Yes, Captain," the ex-Borg confirmed, "emitting the Polaron particles
enabled Lt Tuvok and I to recalibrate /Voyager/'s sensor array. We
located a number of very small and previously undetectable ships
heading in our direction, but when we emitted the Polaron wave, they
turned about and headed back towards a G-type star system."

"So there were more of these. . . emotional vampires on the way,"
Harry muttered.

"Indeed," commented Tuvok, "and given the emotional volatility of the
human species, their depredations amongst the crew would have been
dire."

Ignoring her long-time friend's comment with the ease of long
practice, though she saw Harry roll his eyes, Captain Janeway instead
said, "What we mean to say is thank-you, Mr Paris. Were it not for
you, we would be in a great deal of trouble about now. . . "

Tom shifted uncomfortably in his chair, "I wish I could I say it was
all down to intuitive brilliance on my part but I was just being
honest when I told the alien it overplayed its hand. It didn't fail
because I was clever enough to figure it out, it was just arrogantly
stupid."

"How so?" enquired Seven of Nine, raising her eyebrow in a manner
similar to Tuvok.

Tom shrugged. "I've been on the receiving end of infidelity before,
and sure I was angry, but I was also hurt and confused and forced to
examine how I could have contributed to the situation. I have to admit
on one occasion I'd been neglectful and taking the woman in question
for granted. When I thought B'Elanna. . . I was furious but whenever I
attempted to cool down and try to think about maybe talking things out
with B'Elanna I was just swamped with feelings of murderous rage. Once
I'd realised that wasn't natural I immediately thought of Betazoids,
and since Crewman Jurot's a teddy-bear with no reason to have a
homicidal vendetta against me, the next logical deduction was empathic
alien of the not-nice variety."

"Nevertheless, you saved all our hides," Janeway emphasised.

"Mr Paris may have exceeded even that accomplishment, Captain," Tuvok
stated at that point, making them all look at him in surprise.

"Oh, really?" She looked at Tom who was as clearly intrigued as
everyone else by this commendation.

The Vulcan inclined his head towards Tom in a manner that veered
dangerously close to approbation. "Due to Seven's recalibration of our
sensors I also picked up two disparate vessels of unknown
configuration that had apparently been tracking our progress for some
time. They were on the very edge of sensor range. When we began
emitting the Polaron wave, the small ships initially veered towards
their positions before turning back towards the G-type star system, as
Seven has said. I ran a spectral analysis of the ships and was able to
determine that both appeared to have suddenly begun emitting Polaron
particle waves. I would submit that the secret is out of how to
neutralise the threat of the empathic aliens, thanks to Lt Paris."

"I want you to keep emitting the wave continuously until we're well
past that G-type star system," Janeway ordered. "If that's everything.
. . ?"

"Lt Paris, I am curious," said Seven as she paused in the act of
rising from her chair.

"About?" Tom asked.

"Would you have cut down the alien creature if Lt Tuvok had not had a
method of forcing it to immediately leave the ship?"

There was an absolute silence; Tom was aware of the way B'Elanna kept
her gaze on his face, as if to monitor for the slightest hint of
dissembling; they were /all/ watching his reaction intently.

"I'd like to think that I wouldn't have. . . but I know myself too
well." He looked at them all sombrely. "In all honesty, I don't know.
The Tom Paris that was sprung from New Zealand penal colony to come on
this ride would certainly have had no hesitation in killing it,
unarmed or not, but I'm not that Tom Paris anymore, which, all things
considered, is probably a good thing."

"I see," Seven nodded sharply in the manner which indicated she would
mull over his statement for quite some time.

"Dismissed," Captain Janeway excused them all, but she did not
immediately get up and return to the Bridge, instead taking a deep
breath.

It had been a close run thing, /too/ close. Those empathic aliens
could and would have wreaked havoc had it not been for Tom Paris and a
large dollop of pure luck. If the aliens had 'read' her own carefully
concealed emotions and starting projecting mass hallucinations of her
kissing and embracing Chakotay all over the ship, the consequences
would have been catastrophic.

It was even possible that the aliens would have been even more
sophisticated and projected hallucinations such as Naomi Wildman in
danger or dying, which would have caused a massive emotional response
from the entire ship's complement. There was not a member of the
entire crew, including Seven, who would not undertake any necessary
measure to protect the only child born on /Voyager/ to date.

It was fortunate that Tom Paris had retained enough rationality to
know something was wrong, and to recognise Chakotay's general decency
of character made it highly unlikely he would engage in such
reprehensible behaviour regardless of the fact that the two men
occasionally still clashed on certain points - in fact she strongly
suspected both of them secretly rather enjoyed their wittily acerbic
exchanges and ongoing game of subterfuges and counter-ploys; Kes had
once claimed that half the time Tom Paris undertook some harebrained
scam simply because he knew how happy it made Chakotay to 'find him
out'.

She permitted herself one loud, wistful sigh, for she knew how jealous
she herself was whenever Chakotay showed a romantic interest in a
woman, regardless of the fact that as long as she was /Captain/
Janeway and he was /First Officer/ Chakotay any personal relationship
was impossible and indeed would be deeply damaging to /Voyager/'s
chances of making it home intact. Had she been in Tom Paris's place,
she doubted she could have shown such restraint. . .

---
Epilogue
---

The console in the alcove beeped softly as B'Elanna adjusted the warp
plasma flow. The few crewmembers on duty in the graveyard shift paid
no attention as Chakotay entered with a datapad and went to her
position, but a close observer would have noted the rigid tension in
her posture as Chakotay ostensibly laid down the datapad and inclined
his head as if they were having a quiet conversation.

For a moment neither spoke; then B'Elanna ground out, "It's over,
Chakotay. It has to be. . . "

"I know. . . " his voice was soft with infinite regret but acceptance.
"I don't think I've ever experienced such shame and self-disgust as I
did on the Bridge when Tom told the entity I had /honour/ and
/integrity/. If Tom /ever/ found out that seeing us together in the
/Hydroponics/ bay was the /only/ hallucination. . . "

"It takes two to tango, Chakotay," B'Elanna reminded him with bitter
self-recrimination, but then she looked up at him, her eyes sad and
longing. "I do love Tom, and it's about time I started acting like it,
instead of being constantly ruled by my fears of losing those I love
and trying to pre-emptively distance myself from the anticipated pain.
Tom deserves more than me keeping him at arm's length even while
claiming to love him because of my irrational fears of what /might/
happen; /you/ deserve more than to just be my back-up bed-mate plan
because I'm too afraid to risk giving my all to Tom. . . and /I/
deserve more than to be just your substitute for Kathryn Janeway."

"I know. . . " he looked sorrowfully down at the deck plate, admitting
bleakly, "I've been sticking my head in the sand, but I have to accept
the fact that as long as we are Captain and First Officer in the Delta
Quadrant, there'll never be anything more between us than that, at
least not if we have any sense of personal responsibility and
acceptance of moral obligation to get this crew safely home. I need to
make a decision, one way or the other, instead of just avoiding. . . "

"Decision?"

"Whether to get over my feelings for. . . Kathryn. . . however long it
takes and move on with my life with someone else, or to wait and hope
and that we /could/ have a future together if we get lucky enough to
make it back to the Alpha Quadrant any time this decade."

B'Elanna raised her hand and laid it flat on his chest, feeling the
sensation of his heart beating beneath her palm; it was an old gesture
between them, poignantly familiar. "Chakotay, I do love you, and I
think a part of me will always be /in/ love with you. But our time
passed before we ever encountered /Voyager/. We would never have lasted
in the long term and we both know it - we knew when we ended our
affair the first time around; eventually you would have despised my
volatility and I would have hated your placidity. I love Tom in a way
I've never felt about anyone and nothing is more important to me than
his happiness."

Chakotay lifted his hand and gently laid it over her own, brushing her
knuckles with the pad of his thumb. "I feel the same way about. . .
her. . . even if all I can ever be is her second-in-command, then it's
worth it to make her happy - and keep her safe as much as I'm able."

They were temporarily alone and unobserved; swiftly Chakotay and
B'Elanna's lips met in a passionately desperate kiss, before they each
stepped away from each other. Chakotay picked up the datapad and left
engineering superficially as calmly as he'd entered it while B'Elanna
continued to work resolutely at the console, and nobody was close
enough to hear the way her breath hitched on soft sobs.

Almost.

Pain flared in his hand and Harry realised he was gripping the
manifold spanner so hard it was digging deep grooves into his flesh.
Right now he was never so regretful that he had always heeded his
mother's warnings against procrastination and had decided to check the
fluctuations in the plasma relays tonight instead of tomorrow morning;
/Ensign Eager strikes again/.

He lay absolutely still for several moments after the soft rustlings
below had disappeared. Only then did he begin to ease his way back
along the Jefferies Tube, moving with a fraction of normal speed to
ensure he made no noise. When he got to a junction he stopped,
addressing to himself the question of /what/ was he going to do?

The immediate and certain answer that came back from his Id was that
Tom Paris must never, ever know. In common with certain personality
types of attractive men who had had a lot of women as paramours, when
he finally /had/ met the woman of his dreams, Tom hadn't just fallen
hard so much as wildly plummeted. The sheer strength of his feelings
towards B'Elanna were of an almost frightening intensity. Should Tom
ever learn about B'Elanna and Chakotay's betrayal his devastation
would be total, and it would precipitate a wild spiral of
self-destructive behaviour that nothing and nobody would ever be able
to pull him out of as Janeway, Harry and B'Elanna had managed to do
when the careless, obdurate ex-convict swaggered onto /Voyager/ hiding
his hurt behind a devil-may-care façade of insouciant indifference.

By the same token, neither could anyone /else/ know. The Maquis had
been part of the crew long enough now that most people had all but
forgotten they were /not/ the original personnel in their positions,
but if this were to become known, it would tear the crew apart
psychologically; Chakotay and B'Elanna would be reviled and viewed
with contempt instead of being respected and admired. The crew's
chances of surviving to make it home to the Alpha Quadrant would go
into freefall if they had to work under a First Officer and Chief
Engineer that they despised. Captain Janeway herself would never
/publicly/ treat them any differently, but in private her respect and
admiration for both of her officers would be destroyed and any
reciprocal romantic attachment she might presently feel for Chakotay
would be annihilated never to be rekindled.

Besides, he himself was in no position to be throwing stones in this
particular glasshouse. Although he'd loved Libby he'd been tempted to
cheat on her once; as the overcrowded transport shuttle had pulled
away leaving him on the platform, all the guilt about what he'd been
about to do had come crashing down on him, but had it not been for
that fluke preventing his treachery, he would have made his illicit
rendezvous. He was not sufficiently without his own sin to be able to
cast the first stone at B'Elanna and Chakotay. They weren't saints,
but by the same token, they weren't evil incarnate either. Their
illicit affair was a mistake that it was obvious both deeply regretted
and were shamed by, and self-righteously exposing them to the hatred,
contempt and scorn of everyone would only destroy a lot of people's
lives and chances of happiness.

Making his decision, Harry began to shuffle along again. Fortunately,
as he had discerned at a very young age, there were distinct
advantages to being him. All his life he had found that being 'good
old Harry' was a distinct plus; few had any inkling of the secrets he
knew and kept behind his open, cheerful, innocent face. It was time
for 'good old Harry' to add another secret to that mental compartment
marked THIS NEVER HAPPENED: ACCESS DENIED.

---

The End

---

© 2005, Catherine D. Stewart

NB: this has been mentioned to me as an "error" so I will explain; the
customary form of address to a Lieutenant was/is "Mr" as well as by
military rank of "Lt" (similarly medical doctors who reach the heady
heights of being a surgeon were/are addressed by the honorific "Mr"
instead of "Dr"). I have no idea why, but as far as military
authenticity goes, there was nothing erroneous in Captain Janeway et
al referring to Tom (or anyone of Lieutenant rank) interchangeably as
"Lt Paris" and "Mr Paris" as they did in episodes throughout the
series.