The BLTS Archive- What the Krenim Know
by Ellison Wonderland (ewonder2001@yahoo.com.au)

---

Feedback: yes please!

Synopsis: I've always has a problem with what Admiral Janeway did in
the final episodes of Voyager. This story is a brief exploration of
that. Acknowledgements: special thanks to Judy and T'Boy for their
encouragement on this one.

---
December 2377, Old Calendar
---

Tom Paris was no stranger to a barstool. Like riding a bike or
falling off a log, the cynics were right when they said it was the
easiest thing in the world, and you never really forgot how.

Tom hadn't had a drink for years. The days of hopeless, helpless
dependence had seemed safely in the past, wiped out by enforced
drying out in Auckland and then on Voyager, followed by happiness of a
sort with B'Elanna. Tom had known he was settling when he married her,
but at the time he just thanked his lucky stars for a chance at even
that much.

At first it had been a few beers to take the edge off. Then a whiskey
to help him sleep at night. One became two. Two became four. You
didn't have to have graduated astrophysics to know what came after
four.

Now, most days, he hardly stirred from the bar at all. Starfleet, it
seemed, had forgotten to cancel his unlimited credit, a reward from a
Federation grateful for his part in the return of its long lost
wanderers, the much celebrated crew of the starship Voyager.

"Tom Paris."

Shit. He knew that voice. Low, scraped over gravel. Intense. Earnest.
Son of a fucking bitch.

It was just past dinner hour on this godforsaken world, far from
civilisation in the DMZ. Closer to breakfast, and Tom would have
known better than to have taken a swing at his unwelcome visitor.
Hell, closer to breakfast and it might have even connected.

Tom's punch missed by a mile and he tasted the barroom floor with his
tongue, head too heavy to lift and face his tormentor. The woman they
called Nemesis.

"I need you, Tom. I need a pilot."

Fuck off, he tried to say, but even that much was more effort than
she deserved. Horrified, hating himself for it, Tom started to cry.
Loud, noisy sobs, swallowed up by a dirty floor on a planet whose
name he couldn't even remember.

"Tom. I think I've found a way to put it right, to fix things, but
you've got to help me."

"Put it right?" He tried to laugh but it came out as another sob,
choked off before the traitorous tears could leak out of him again.
"Isn't that how we got into this fucking nightmare in the first
place?"

"We have to try, Tom. It's what I – what we – do."

Tom looked up at Kathryn Janeway's knees, remembering another offer
he couldn't refuse, seemed like a lifetime ago. He wished to hell
that he'd told her no, and served out his sentence in Auckland for a
few short years. It would have been much better than this lifetime of
horror to which she'd sentenced them all. Though it might prove to be
just as short.

And now, as then, Tom had no choice in the matter. He tried to mouth
an obscenity at her but it was lost in the whine of the transporter
that dissolved them both and took him where he didn't want to go.

---
July 2377, Old Calendar
---


Sitting in front of the review board at DS9 was rather like sharing a
room with clones of his father. They all looked at Tom with just that
edge of paternal superiority, shading into patronising, tutted behind
their hands, and made little notes on their padds when he said
inconsequential things. The other former Maquis were having their
cases reviewed on Earth, having never been processed by the Federation
courts, but Voyager had brought him here for a neutral review of his
sentence by an external arbiter.

Colonel Kira chaired his review board, which was made up in equal
parts of Starfleet and Bajoran military. How such disparate cultures
could produce identikit copies of his father was beyond Tom. Captain
Janeway's presence at his side was a constant comfort. She reminded
him, just by standing next to him, how much he'd broken the mould by
surviving and adapting to what they'd gone through in the Delta
Quadrant. The Voyager crew was unique, as she never tired of telling
him.

Tom hadn't realised how strongly she'd felt it, and just how big were
her balls, until the day that Admiral Janeway turned up on Voyager,
face grim and white hair bound tighter than a Bajoran vedek, come to
change time itself and take them home.

Tom had loved her for it. Worshipped her. They all had, gathered
around Tom's wife and baby daughter in sickbay, talking in hushed
tones of the woman who'd altered the course of history, and met her
nameless, faceless death on a Borg ship so that their lives could be
better.

The only dark spot on Tom's happiness was Chakotay. He knew that he
had no right to be jealous, to lament what might have been, since
reality had given him a wife he loved and a baby he adored. If
Chakotay had found happiness with Seven, what right did Tom have to
complain? That was the difference between him and Janeway. She would
have gone back and changed the past. Tom sucked it up and embraced
the present.

After all, it had given him the precious little life whose nappies
his wife must be changing on Earth even now, a legacy from Tom's past
to his future. He had no right to resent Chakotay finding someone
else. No right at all.

Janeway's fingers squeezed his arm when the recess was over and the
review board came back to give its verdict.

Shit. It was bad news. He was going back to jail, he could tell by
the frowns on their faces. His daughter was gonna have a jailbird for
her daddy.

But Colonel Kira wasn't looking at *him*.

"Captain Janeway," said Colonel Kira. "I'm sorry but you've been
recalled to duty at once. There's a Starfleet priority one message
coming in on all channels. All Fleet ships are to rendezvous at a
classified location."

Huh?

Tom gaped at her. What was he supposed to do, left in a legal limbo?
Twiddle his thumbs while Voyager went off to sort out a crisis. Not
likely.

"Mr Paris. This hearing is suspended. Your field commission stands.
For the time being," barked Colonel Kira at him, hardly sparing him a
glance. "Well don't just stand there. Move."

Janeway looked a little astounded to be ordered around by an upstart
Bajoran colonel, but she took the hint and called for a transport
back to Voyager.

Saved by the bell, thought Tom.

--

The next few months were chaotic for Voyager.

There was a communications blackout from sector zero zero one for
weeks. Gradually, the story came out in fits and starts. Rumours flew
on the back of innuendo, gossip whispered in the corridors on pain of
treason.

Earth was dead. The plague that had wiped out its human population
had taken a day to spread from San Francisco around the globe. There
wasn't a person left alive within six days. One of the last
broadcasts, received from Mars before it too fell silent, was a coded
message on the Starfleet band, informing the Vulcan medical council
that Seven of Nine's nanoprobes had mutated the minute she breathed in
the mix of atmospheric gases unique to Earth. A week later she was
dead. In a fortnight she had taken the planet with her, and achieved
for the Borg what main force had never done.

The plague only killed humans and it couldn't be stopped. Starfleet,
its ships and personnel seriously depleted after the Dominion War,
just couldn't manage a serious blockade. No quarantine was enough, no
space lane safe, and the Vulcan scientists looked almost emotional
when they predicted the extinction of the human species within ten
years. They would, in the meantime, search for a cure.

The panic was quadrant-wide. The collapse of the Federation was a
near certainty, despite the efforts of the Klingons and the Vulcans
to restore order.

Voyager and its captain, who had changed the past to bring Seven back
to Earth alive, became the most hunted outlaws in the quadrant. Every
bounty hunter, every frightened bastard with a phaser, every grieving
vengeful mob, was after them.

It took Tom a month to find out for sure that a half-Klingon, half-
human baby had no immunity to the plague. His daughter must have died
on Earth, before he'd even had a chance to know her. With no one able
or willing to get within a parsec of the dead planet, Tom knew in his
heart that his wife must have followed soon after. And Chakotay would
have been holding Seven's hand when she died, smack in the middle of
ground zero.

Gone. All gone.

He slipped off Voyager soon after. It was either that or murder the
crazy woman on the bridge, who ranted like a middle-aged Ophelia and
made as little sense. Sure, she knew that she would put all to
rights. Of course she would. She was the woman who changed time
itself to get her way. There was a part of Tom who found her just a
little pathetic.

When he found that the rest of him had actually loaded a hypo with a
lethal dose of poison, he locked himself in his cabin for three days
and drank till he couldn't remember his own name. It was lucky he'd
pre-programmed the transporter for when they came in range of Planet
Bumfuck, DMZ.

And there he stayed, drinking himself to a more merciful death than
his daughter had had, till Captain Janeway came back into his life
with a promise to put things right.

---

"There," said Harry, walking carefully past Tom as if he were a human
time bomb.

Tom winked at him, which just made things worse.

"Don't see a thing," he said, as cheerful as a ghost at Halloween,
while the doctor immobilised him and injected more anti-addictive
drugs.

"Neither did we at first," replied Harry. He looked ten years older.
His parents and Libby had been on Earth during the Great Death, as it
had become known. Even his dog. Harry had cried on his shoulder one
night, wondering aloud how long it took for a pet locked up behind a
home security forcefield to die, with no one left alive to feed it.

Tom patted his shoulder and thought that Harry must be the stupidest
person on Voyager. Tom made no allowances for other people's grief,
or how they might express it. None at all.

"See, there? In the sensor logs from just before Voyager entered the
transwarp conduit. It's a signal, coded and disguised so carefully
that we didn't detect it. It's only by breaking down the sensor logs
to their most fundamental elements of data and putting them back
together again, that we came across it. Seven could probably have
done it in a couple of days. It took us months."

Silence. Tom knew the others were thinking of Seven. He wondered if
they hated her as much as he did.

"What's the signal?" he asked.

"A transmission from the Borg Queen. Not a message, at least not a
conscious one, but a recoding of Seven's nanoprobes. We figure that's
when the change was made, to make them lethal as soon as Seven came
into contact with Earth's atmosphere. If the change had been made any
earlier than that, the EMH swears he would have detected it."

Tom looked Janeway in her bloodshot eyes. "I don't see what
difference this makes."

"It's quite simple," said Kathryn, staring at him as if he were
dense. "I have Admiral Janeways' logs and specs. They're coded for my
personal use. If anyone else tries to open them, they're triggered to
self-destruct. She didn't want the technology to fall into the – erm,
the wrong hands."

"I think it already did," said Tom, softly, challenging her in a way
he did constantly now, and would have cut his own hand off rather
than have done in the past.

Janeway blanched. "You may be right. But the time for recriminations
is past. We're going to take Voyager back in time, to just before
that transmission was sent. That's why we need you, Tom. It's going
to be your trickiest assignment ever. We need you to get us between
the Borg and Voyager in the middle of the battle and hold us in
exactly the right position to jam the signal. It's a type of signal
we've never encountered before, but Harry's worked out that we can
use Voyager itself to emit a field that will block the signal."

"You want to go back and change the past? Again? Excuse me, but isn't
that kinda how we got in this mess in the first place?"

"Would you rather stay here?" asked Janeway.

Good point. Besides, he could tell, from the way she was fingering
her phaser, that he was closer to death than he'd ever been. She was
no longer entirely sane. And suddenly, intensely, Tom wanted to live.
It could all be his again. If Janeway's plan worked.

It had to. Resistance was futile.

---
December 2377, Old Calendar
---


The beaches on Risa were bathed in a sun so rich that it felt like
wading through honey. Tom paused in his stroll, letting the sun warm
his body, enjoying the feel of a man's hands on his ass.

"Where's B'El?" he murmured, sleepily, leaning back into Chakotay's
touch.

"She's taken the baby for a swim," said Chakotay, insinuating his
hand down the back of Tom's trunks in a way that would have been
illegal practically anywhere else.

"Shit," said Tom, stiffening. It wasn't entirely because a thick,
blunt finger had just wormed its way inside his ass. "I hope she's
careful."

Chakotay laughed in his ear, before nibbling it with careless little
bites. A second finger joined the first. Tom was so fucked.

"I like Risa," whispered Chakotay, steering him over to a secluded
grove of palm trees. The rich scent of tropical flowers filled the
air. "You can do anyone, anywhere, anytime. And it's the law.
Otherwise, you've got to leave."

"Yeah," grunted Tom, more interested in the way Chakotay had pressed
him onto a pre-raked bed of leaves and was spreading Tom's legs with
his own. The man could babble later, so long as he fucked Tom now.
Right now.

"C'mon Chakotay. *Do* it."

The commander sometimes teased him for hours, but not this time. He
took Tom hard and fast, fucking him till his knees hit solid ground,
and then pounding a hole into it. Stupid leaves. What a dumb idea. As
if they were going to cushion someone against a really good, old-
fashioned butt fucking.

And Chakotay was nothing if not old fashioned, reaching around like a
gentleman to jerk Tom off with rough, hard strokes that had him
sweating come. It lubricated Chakotay's hand, which jacked him faster
and faster, in time with each brutal thrust of his hips.

They came together, as always. When Chakotay collapsed on top of him,
Tom thought he'd found peace at last.

"So this is where you two sneaked off to," came B'Elanna's voice in
his ear.

Tom was tempted to pretend a snore, but instead he rolled over,
elbowing Chakotay off as he did so, and accepted his baby from her
mother. He grinned up at B'Elanna, cooing to his daughter, trying
hard not to laugh openly at the doting look on Chakotay's face.

"Just wait," he scoffed to B'Elanna, "till I tell Seven about you
wearing that scrap of cloth here amongst all the women on Risa. Um.
There is some cloth there, isn't there? A thread or two?"

B'Elanna smiled nastily. "You do, and I'll tell her about how you
sucked Chakotay off in front of a nun."

"Seven won't care. Besides, I thought she was stuffed. You know, an
exhibit. Didn't realise she was a real nun until she handed me a
cloth afterwards. Not my finest hour."

"You blushed," crowed Chakotay. "Redder than a Tarkelian apple."

"So did you."

"Yes, well…"

"It's too hot," said B'Elanna. "I'm going back to the hotel for a
shower and to give Miral her nap."

Tom shifted in Chakotay's arms, unwilling to give Miral up just  yet.
"You just want to com our wife."

It was B'Elanna's turn to blush. "Yeah, well, it's lonely for her on
Vulcan. No one to talk to but Tuvok and a bunch of scientists."

"I can't imagine how she'll cope with that," said Chakotay,
distracting Tom with a kiss that excavated his tonsils, while
B'Elanna snatched Miral and took off. "Spending our honeymoon  on a
science project instead of doing what I'm going to do to you  and
B'Elanna tonight. And she'll be just as happy."

Tom and Chakotay were gearing up for their second low-down dirty
beach fuck of the day when Voyager commed them.

"Janeway to all crew on Risa. Please report back to Voyager
immediately."

"Shit," cursed Tom, even though he knew Chakotay didn't like him
swearing. "We've only had a couple of days' leave. This had better
not be a drill."

Chakotay laughed at him. "My old knees prefer a bed, anyway. Come on.
The sooner we get back to Voyager, the sooner I can get you into bed
where you belong."

There was no time for sex, however, and instead the three newly weds
had to report to the briefing room.

Captain Janeway looked unaccustomedly grim as she faced her senior
staff.

"There's been an – incident – on Vulcan," she said.

---

The science team, headed by Tuvok and Seven of Nine, had been
experimenting with ways to contain an artificially generated black
hole as an unlimited renewable source of power. The groundwork had
been laid by the Vulcan science academy, which had been studying
Tuvok's original theory for years, but they needed modified Borg
technology to make it work. Seven had been more than happy to join
Tuvok in the work, while her somewhat frivolous life partners sunned
themselves on Risa and got the honeymoon idea out of their systems.

In one sense, the experiment was a spectacular success.

Voyager never made it to within a hundred light years of Vulcan.
Starfleet had sealed the system and not even Janeway's celebrity or
connections could get them through. In the end, it was Admiral Owen
Paris himself who turned up on Voyager a week later to tell his son
what had happened to his wife.

The older Paris appeared a shell of a man, shattered by the effort of
fighting Starfleet brass single-handedly for years to keep the
Pathfinder project going. His son's safe return had almost been an
anticlimax; Tom's announcement of the pending group marriage nearly
finished the Admiral off.

"She wouldn't have suffered any pain. Nor would Commander Tuvok,"
said the Admiral, obviously trying to pretend that a Klingon woman
wasn't sobbing angrily next to him, being patted ineffectually by his
former protιgι, Kathryn Janeway.

"What exactly happened, Admiral?" asked Janeway.

"As far as we can tell, the Borg technology failed and they lost
containment, after finally managing to create the artificial mini-
black hole for the first time ever."

"Failed? How? Why?"

"We have the data that was being transmitted from the Science
Academy. I'll have it downloaded to Voyager."

"Dad, what happened to Seven?" demanded Tom, when it seemed as if the
dried up husks of his father and captain would talk science even as
they planned their funeral orations.

"Not just your wife, son. The whole of Vulcan has been absorbed by
the black hole."

Tom's blood froze. A billion Vulcans?

Fuck.

"And that's not all." The admiral ran a hand through his hair. He
looked as if he were dead but was still carrying on because no one
had remembered to tell him. "It's expanding. Nothing we've tried can
stop it. It's sucked in the whole of the Vulcan system already. At
this rate, it will have absorbed the entire Alpha Quadrant in twenty
years."

No one said anything. There really wasn't anything to say.

---

"There," said Harry, smelling as if he hadn't bathed in a week.

Tom wrinkled his nose. "What exactly am I looking at?"

"The reason why the technology from Seven's implants failed,"
explained Harry. "It wasn't an accident, Tom. I found this signal
buried in the sensor logs from just before Voyager returned to the
Alpha Quadrant. It's the only thing that explains the anomalies in
the data transmitted from Vulcan; anomalies that weren't there when
Seven had her last physical by the doc. This signal is hidden in such
a sophisticated way that I can't be sure there weren't even more like
it."

"But why?" asked Tom. "Who sent the signal?"

Janeway's face was white, her hands shaking. "The point of origin is
clearly the Borg. They must have meant to sabotage any attempt we
made to use Seven's technology, if we destroyed their conduit and
made it back to the Alpha Quadrant."

"Then they fucked up," said Tom. "Not even the Borg could have wanted
a planet-eating stellar phenomenon that's gonna consume the entire
galaxy, including them."

"We have to put this right," said the captain, ignoring Tom's
outburst. "I have – I have Admiral Janeway's specs, the technology
she used to take her back to precise points of time in the Delta
Quadrant."

"Why not just go back a month and stop the experiment?" asked
B'Elanna, suddenly so full of hope after such anguish that Tom
started to shake at the thought of her possible disappointment. He
didn't think either of them could live through that again.

"No," said Janeway, "if Seven's technology has been tampered with, we
don't know what else might go wrong with it in the future, what other
effects there might be. We need to return to just before the tampering
occurred and block the Borg signal."

"I hate to be the one who mentions it," said Chakotay, watching
B'Elanna as closely as Tom, "but Starfleet specifically forbids time
travel. We don't know what effects will come from changing the
timeline. These things have a way of equalising themselves. You know
temporal theory as well as I do. Changes to the timeline can cause
all sorts of bizarre weaknesses in the fabric of reality."

"I think I'll take that uncertainty over the certainty of the
extinction of the galaxy," retorted Janeway.

"Federation scientists will find a way to stop this black hole,
Kathryn. They did it with a similar anomaly in the Deveron system.
You know it's only a matter of time."

The pun must have been unintentional but Tom smirked anyway, despite
the gravity of the situation. He wanted to start screaming or firing
his phaser, just to release the extreme tension in the room.

"No, I don't know that," whispered Kathryn, almost inaudible. "What I
do know is that *I* am responsible for this, and I have to fix it."

"You're not responsible for what your future self may or may not end
up doing. You are not that person yet."

"What about Seven?" demanded B'Elanna, getting in Chakotay's  face.
"And Tuvok? This way, we get them back. Alive."

Tom watched Chakotay closely. Admiral Janeway had claimed that Seven
died during the long journey home, and Chakotay'd followed soon
after, heart-broken. Observing him now, tightly controlled, impassive
even, Tom wondered just how much was true of what the admiral had told
them.

"You'd do it if it were Tom who had died," spat B'Elanna after a taut
silence. She hit Chakotay so hard that he almost bounced off the wall.

"This isn't up for debate people," said Janeway, as Tom moved to help
his husband off the floor, covering B'Elanna with his phaser. It was
set to stun. Probably.

"Starfleet has us under radio silence in any case," continued the
captain. "There's no way to ask permission. So it's my decision, and
I've made up my mind."

Tom wondered if his past self, flushed with their triumphal return
from the Delta, would have the courage to propose marriage to
Chakotay and Seven, second time around.

Fuck, he hoped so.

---
July 2377, Old Calendar
---

"Take us through the conduit, Mr Paris," ordered the captain, as
exploding Borg cubes pursued them still, fireballs that blossomed
ever outwards into space.

Somewhere behind them, he knew, Admiral Janeway was dying. If this
worked, she would never have existed at all.

"And Tom," added the first officer, "don't scratch the paint."

Fuck you, thought Tom, as he struggled not to laugh.

It was the most precise piece of flying Tom had ever had to do, but
he brought Voyager safely through a conduit so narrow and twisty that
it really should have been a physical impossibility. Nor, he was
willing to swear, had he scratched the paint.

They emerged into hell, the blast of energy weapons lighting up the
Alpha Quadrant skies.

"Something's followed us through," shouted Harry.

They watched the viewscreen in amazement as the combined firepower of
Earth's defence force destroyed the Borg sphere that had tailed them
all the way home.

"Those are the home defences," said Tom. "We must be inside the Sol
system defence perimeter. We did it. We're home."

"Captain," said Tuvok, his unemotional voice punctuating the euphoric
shouts on the bridge. "There is a subspace aperture opening off our
starboard bow."

"What the hell is that?" demanded Janeway.

"It's gone now, but residual particles indicate it was a vessel and
its destination was fluidic space."

"Ohmigod," said Tom, straightening in his chair, despite the
exhaustion of his most difficult flying ever. "How long have they
been tailing us? It must have been years."

"Species 8472," said Janeway flatly, ignoring Starfleet's  hails.
"They followed us through. We've led them straight to Earth."

"Logic suggests that they have developed an effective defence against
our doomsday weapon," said Tuvok. "Their intentions towards a species
they must consider the greatest threat they've ever faced are not
difficult to extrapolate."

"Welcome back, Voyager," interrupted Admiral Paris' voice over the
com system. "You've been missed and long awaited. Tom, welcome home."

"Thanks, Admiral," replied the captain. "But there's, that is, we may
have brought a little problem with us."

"Not so little, really," added Chakotay, who was innately honest.

Tom always remembered that day not for their triumphal homecoming but
as the first in the war between the Federation and Species 8472. A war
the Federation seemed to have basically lost, after only six months of
battles, retreats, and constant slaughter.

The successful termination of Project Pathfinder was not hailed as an
unqualified success.

---
December 2377, Old Calendar
---

Tom packed up all the holopics and vids of B'Elanna and Miral and
stored them in the ship stronghold. He'd received the last one a
month ago. Since then, there'd been no further traffic between the
Federation and the Klingon Empire. He wanted to make sure the pics
survived, or so he told himself, but the truth was that he couldn't
bear to look at them.

At the time, it had seemed the right thing to do. They had a child
and Voyager was a warship, fighting on the frontlines. There'd never
been any question but that B'Elanna was going to take their daughter
away. The Klingon home world was safe, as the Federation's former
allies held themselves strictly neutral in yet another bizarre inter-
dimensional war that Earth seemed to have brought on itself.

Tom thought seriously about going with them. In the end, he knew that
his place was on Voyager, trying to stop the implacable, vicious
aliens that he had led to the Alpha Quadrant with his inimitable
piloting. Sometimes, he wished he weren't quite so good. They were all
quick to take on their share of guilt.

In his heart of hearts, Tom knew that he couldn't leave Chakotay,
even for his daughter. Not while she had her fierce mother to look
after and protect her.

Chakotay and Seven had continued to date, although holodeck
privileges were a thing of the past. Voyager was stripped back for
war and running lower on supplies and power than it had been even in
the dark days of the Kazon attacks. Somehow, Voyager weathered each
assault by Species 8472 and fell back with the fleet survivors, fewer
of them every time.

Chakotay and Tom met in secret. They fucked in a Jeffries tube once,
the night of the fall of Betazed, but mainly they sneaked into each
other's quarters. Eventually, to conserve power and in recognition
that no more reinforcements were coming, some decks were powered down
and shared quarters became the norm. The pilot moved in with the first
officer and no one batted an eyelid.

After that, Chakotay stopped dating Seven and nobody pretended that
the second bed in his quarters was being slept in. Tom and Chakotay
lay in each other's arms at night, talking quietly about the war, and
planning their escape when Starfleet finally bowed to the inevitable.

The Federation was going to lose the Alpha Quadrant. It was just a
question of when.

Tom was determined to get to Kronos and rejoin B'Elanna and Miral. It
might stay safe there, since the indications were that Species 8472
couldn't survive in non-fluidic space indefinitely. When the war was
over, the strange aliens were likely to melt away as if they'd never
been. Conquest was possible for them; occupation was not.

Chakotay was wary of following Tom back to his wife and child. It
never ceased to amaze Tom, that a man like Chakotay, so centred and
in control, could be as jealous and insecure as – well, as Tom.

"B'El won't mind. In fact, she's already moved on. It's the Klingon
way. I told her though – she's not to let that bastard adopt my
daughter while I'm still alive. She needs the protection of a *name*,
to survive on Kronos. I do understand that."

But he didn't really. B'Elanna had given up on him so quickly. It
hurt more than he'd thought it would and Chakotay kissed him softly,
squeezing him so tight that Tom's ribs complained about it for days
afterwards. At the time, he just squeezed back, thinking that these
stolen moments with Chakotay were worth a future of pain.

"She knows I love you," said Tom, whispering it into Chakotay's ear.

It was the first time he'd ever said it.

They sucked each other's cocks, slow and lazy, head to toe, sobbing
for breath. Chakotay came first but Tom kept on swallowing, working
Chakotay with his mouth until the commander's cock was hard enough to
drill him.

Neither thought it odd to find Kathryn Janeway on Tom's unused bed,
as they lay quietly in the afterglow. She walked the ship at night,
in between battles, fighting to stay sane under a burden of guilt
that would have crushed a lesser soul.

"It's not your fault," said Chakotay, offering absolution.

Tom wasn't so sure, so he stayed silent.

"There's a way to put this right," said Janeway, her face flickering
in the starlight from the window behind her.

Tom watched her in the shadows, gauging what was left of her sanity.

"How so?" asked Chakotay. He stroked Tom's hair, smooth and
rhythmically, making him feel like an oversized cat.

"Seven and I have done the calculations a thousand times. There's no
way to stop the spy ship from following us through the conduit. So we
have to abort the return. Come home the long way. We know, from what
Admiral Janeway told us, that Species 8472 must give up somewhere
along the way. They certainly didn't follow us all the way back to
Earth, in her timeline."

"She – you – changed time. And now you want to change it back again."
Chakotay didn't seem too worried about that. "How do we do it?"

Tom tried to pull the sheet a little closer. He didn't really want to
hang out in front of his captain.

"I have Admiral Janeway's specs and technology. I can take us back in
time to warn – myself – not to listen to – myself."

Tom leaned into Chakotay's body, shivering. He remembered what
Admiral Janeway told them of the future. How Chakotay and Seven would
get together, and Chakotay would die of a broken heart.

Chakotay stroked his hair, soothing, loving.

This wouldn't happen if they returned. It would be part of a possible
future that didn't eventuate. He would never lie in the arms of the
one person he now knew that he really loved. He would settle for
B'Elanna. Poor B'El. But he would have Miral.

A lover. A child. Who could choose, if put to it? Not Tom.

"Things aren't meant to be the way they are," said Chakotay. "The
future that Admiral Janeway told us about sounded the logical way for
things to unfold. This invasion by Species 8472, the total destruction
of the Federation and maybe the rest of the Alpha Quadrant as well, it
seems unavoidable in this altered timeline. That's an anomaly like the
ones they teach in temporal theory. You know. Cast a stone in a pool,
watch a small splash followed by ever- widening ripples."

"But you died," wailed Janeway. "So did Seven. That's what we're
going back to..."

Tom tried to hide his tears. "Do we even know if it will work?" he
asked, keeping his voice as level as he could. "Two wrongs don't make
a right. If you – um – plunge your arm in to pull the stone back out,
doesn't that make just as many ripples?"

"It's an analogy Tom," laughed Chakotay, who seemed to be taking his
forthcoming heartbreak and death very lightly. "Don't take it so
literally. Besides, we can't undo everything that the admiral did.
Her ship outguns ours. We can't take her out before she contacts
Voyager. I seem to recall that Seven was very reluctant to keep on
dating me after what the admiral told her. Maybe my past self will go
with that. Who knows? In the meantime, we have to persuade ourselves
not to return via the Borg conduit. We may fail. But I think Kathryn's
right. We have to try to repair reality, while we still can."

"Captain, do you need us on the bridge while you prepare for this?"
asked Tom.

"Not really. Why?"

"I don't want to get out of this bed till you're ready to depart.
This may be our last time together – you owe us that much."

Janeway bowed her head, but he knew that she saw his misery, and
added it to her burden of guilt.

"As you were," she said, getting up stiffly and moving towards the
door as to her own execution. "You have 24 hours. Make the most of
them, gentlemen."

Then she was gone. And they did.

---
July 2377, Old Calendar
---

Two Voyagers and a shuttlecraft went their separate ways.

One Voyager continued its long slow journey to the Alpha Quadrant. It
bypassed the Borg transwarp conduits, and would take a further 16
years to get home.

The other Voyager was gone in the blink of an eye, because it had
never existed.

No one knows what happened to Admiral Janeway's shuttle, whether she
changed the future enough never to have existed in the first place,
or returned intact to her own time to face the music in the form of
the temporal police.

And if one Tom Paris sent a secret signal to another Tom Paris,
telling him to get off his ass and into Chakotay's bed before things
got too serious with Seven, no one but Tom Paris will ever know.

---

The End