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  When she later heard of B’Oraq’s assignment to the Bak’rikan, B’Elanna often wondered if it was because B’Oraq had embarrassed so many Cardassian doctors, at least one of whom was brother to a legate, that her requests to be posted to a Klingon base or ship were denied, instead being dumped onto the traitor’s vessel.

  Not that it mattered. B’Oraq had saved Miral’s life. That put her in B’Elanna’s mother’s debt, a debt the physician no doubt was calling in now to help her and her Cardassian master regain some lost prominence.

  “Well, I must be off, Daughter,” Miral said. “I will be leaving for Earth on the Negh’Var tomorrow morning.”

  “Quite an escort,” B’Elanna said. The Negh’Var was among the cream of the Klingon fleet.

  “Indeed. Good-bye, Daughter. Give my regards to Doctor B’Oraq.”

  With that, Miral’s face faded from the screen.

  “I will, Mother,” B’Elanna said quietly, then rose and headed for the lift, ordering it to level seven. She suddenly found herself full of nervous tension she wanted to work off before supper.

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  Kabor kneels in front of her, smiling as he uses the metal tool to shatter the bones in her fingers even as Jabin asks the same question he always asks, the one that she never answers.

  “Don’t worry, my love, I’ll get you out of here somehow. Just be patient.”

  Neelix stealing a moment with her behind the Kazon-Ogla’s back, promising a rescue she fears will never come.

  “Those are just stories, Kes, legends told of a time that never existed.”

  The Ocampan elders think that being over eight years old somehow gives them wisdom, yet they refuse to question any of the assumptions about the Ocampa that had accreted over the decades.

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  Jabin keeps asking the question.

  Kes keeps refusing to answer.

  The pain never ceases, agony piling on agony.

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  She keeps thinking they have run out of ways to hurt her. They keep proving her wrong.

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  Stop hurting me! Stop the pain, please, I’ll do anything!

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  Kabor applies a piece of metal to her head.

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  The pain is blinding.

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  Kabor goes to the next highest setting. The pain is worse.

  “Where is the entrance to the Ocampa city?”

  “You’ll never know!”

  Kes screamed as she remembered the thoughts of all the Kazon-Ogla as they died. Some plotted revenge or mutiny against Jabin. Some thought about their next meal. One thought about a painting he’d left unfinished back home. Another wondered about the fate of his son.

  None of them expected to die. Nor had Kes expected to kill them.

  “Interesting.”

  Opening her eyes, Kes saw a strange alien-looking man standing over her. Only then did she realize that she was lying down, and that she couldn’t move. She saw no restraints—she appeared to be lying flat on a bed of some kind—but every attempt to move was met with overwhelming resistance.

  The man standing over her could have been Ocampa, if not for the lack of hair on his crown and his peculiar ears. Her experience of aliens was limited to the Kazon and the Talaxians—neither of them looked as much like the Ocampa as this man did.

  She tried to speak, but only a croak escaped her lips.

  “You must be parched,” the man said. He stood between the bed and a console of some kind. Turning, he pressed a control. With a whirr of machinery, something lowered toward Kes. It had a nozzle at the end, and it squirted water into her mouth.

  Coughing as the water forced its way down her throat, Kes wondered where she was. She knew that water was at a premium on most worlds in this area of space. Whoever my captors are, they must be very wealthy.

  After she finished coughing, and swallowed all the water, the nozzle whirred back up to wherever it had come from.

  “Where am I? Where’s Neelix?” she asked, her voice a croaking shadow of what it should have been.

  “You are in Laboratory 3 of Monor Base—the foremost scientific think tank in the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. At least, that’s what they claim.” The first sentence had been spoken as if he was reciting a lesson learned by rote. The second had been laced with what Kes interpreted as sarcasm or contempt—or both. “My name,” the man continued, “is Lewis Zimmerman, and I’m a Terran. The fact that I can give you my name rather than a number is a testament to my considerable genius, which is being put to use in this think tank. Right now, my job is to find a way to create telepaths. So who should drop on my doorstep but you? You call yourself Kes, correct?”

  That brought Kes up short. The last thing she remembered was being in the escape pod from Neelix’s ship. She recalled no conversations with this Luisimurman person. “How did you know that?”

  Luisimurman started pressing more controls on the console. “I’m a scientist—it’s my job to know things that are hidden to most. I know that this Neelix person you queried me about is the love of your life.” He looked back at her. “Such a charming notion.” Turning back to the console, he went on: “What confuses me is that you claim to be from a world and a species that I do not recognize—and neither does the computer, which pays more attention to the comings and goings of aliens than I. It doesn’t know who the Ocampa, the Kazon, the Talaxians, or the Haakonians are, either.” He turned to stare down at her, his arms now folded. “Where do you come from, Kes of the Ocampa?”

  “You’ve answered that question,” she said. “I’m from Ocampa. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”

  Shaking his head, Luisimurman said, “No, you see, that’s just not good enough. Now, I was able to extract this information thanks to this little gadget of mine.” He pointed at a piece of machinery that sat on the other side of the bed. Kes hadn’t noticed it before, but she had been focused on Luisimurman, noting the differences between him and a typical Ocampa. She wondered where Terrans came from, and if they were perhaps related to the Ocampa in the distant past. The tendency to lose hair and the strange ears could, perhaps, be explained by differences in environment….

  She forced herself back to the present. While Luisimurman didn’t have the Kazon-Ogla’s overt cruelty, he was also holding Kes against her will. She doubted his intentons were any more honorable than Jabin’s.

  “This is my own variation on a Klingon mind-sifter.” Luisimurman shook his head again. “Barbarians, the Klingons. Their version is almost appallingly crude, and generally leaves the subject in a vegetative state. What, I ask, is the point in that? A waste of material.” The Terran seemed lost in thought for a moment, then shook his head quickly. “Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. I was able to use it to probe your memories. It also was able to penetrate your psionic shields, which alone gives me a very important piece of information, to wit, that you have psionic shields. You are, indeed, a telepath.”

  Suddenly, Kes realized what was missing. For weeks, she had been in the company of the Kazon-Ogla, as well as Neelix, and as time went on, she sensed more and more of their thoughts. When she killed Jabin and his people, she knew what each of them had in their minds at the moment of death.

  But I’m not hearing anything now. Is Luisimurman immune somehow?

  “Luckily for my own peace of mind, I was able to use a psi-inhibitor on myself.” He frowned. “At least, I think I did. The only tests I could run were to make sure there weren’t any harmful side effects. Since there are no telepaths extant, I have no way of knowing if it truly blocks my thoughts from your ability to read them.” He took a breath. “Still, it should keep my head off limits to your prying.”

&
nbsp; That explains that, then. Kes still knew very little. She was obviously a long way from home. The Caretaker must have sent us far away to keep us out of Kazon hands. It made sense—the Caretaker had been looking out for the needs of the Ocampa for many generations. He must have done the same for her when the Kazon was in pursuit.

  Aloud, she continued to say nothing. She saw no reason to do anything to help this man—any more than there had been reason to help Jabin.

  “Now that we’ve established for sure that you are a telepath,” Luisimurman said as he walked over to the console again, “we need to run some tests. Of course, you need to be conscious for those, which is why I woke you up in the first place. First things first—testing your pain response.”

  “Aaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhhh!” It was Kabor all over again as every nerve ending in Kes’s body suddenly felt as if it were on fire. She screamed and screamed and screamed until her throat was raw, and then she screamed some more, wishing it would stop, stop, stop, STOP!

  And then it did.

  “Interesting.” Luisimurman hadn’t touched any of his controls until after he said that word. Then he did, and a humming that Kes hadn’t noticed stopped. “You were able to block the pain when it got to be too much. Also some impressive fortitude—any Terran or Cardassian would have fallen unconscious from that much pain, and some Klingons might’ve as well.”

  Kes did not explain that she had quite recently suffered far worse at the hands of the Kazon-Ogla.

  “So, we’ll have to see how far that goes. Let’s try the second level.”

  Steeling herself, Kes prepared for more pain. I resisted Kabor, you monster, I can resist you, too….

  “Uh, sir? We’ve got Monor Base—the supervisor.”

  The communications officer spoke those words to Evek as soon as he entered the bridge, Doctor B’Oraq alongside him, blathering on about the chief engineer being sick with something. Evek would have been more interested if the engineer in question wasn’t an insubordinate tralk. As it was, Evek was simply glad that the glinn was suffering.

  Evek was equally glad to be hearing from the halfbreed. For one thing, it meant B’Oraq would shut up. More importantly, though, it meant that a determination had been made regarding the alien woman—no other news was likely to prompt her to call him.

  “Put her on-screen.”

  The main viewer shifted from a vista of Ardana from orbital heights to the ugly face of Supervisor B’Elanna. “Gul Evek, Doctor B’Oraq—I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  A pit opened in Evek’s stomach. He turned angrily on B’Oraq. “Damn you, woman, you—”

  “The alien woman is a telepath.”

  For a moment, Evek stood there with his mouth open. Then he turned back to the viewer. “How, precisely, is that bad news, Supervisor?”

  “Oh, it’s good news for me, Evek. You see, the woman—her name is Kes, by the way—Kes is quite a powerful telepath. Doctor Zimmerman did several comprehensive tests.”

  Evek turned around so he could sit in his command chair. “I still fail to see how this qualifies as bad news. With this Kes woman, we—”

  “We? Oh, you are presumptuous, Evek. There is no ‘we.’ There is you—who violated Alliance regulations.”

  Evek straightened in his command chair. “Violated? I did no such—”

  “Alliance procedure calls for Command to be notified immediately if a potential telepath is detected. That has been a standing order for as long as the Alliance has been in existence. Do you know what the punishment is for violating Alliance procedure?”

  At sensor control, a glinn whose name Evek had never cared enough to learn said, “Sir, we’re being targeted by weapons on the surface of Ardana.”

  The pit opened wider. “You wouldn’t—”

  “Wouldn’t what?” B’Elanna asked in a sweet voice.

  B’Oraq stepped forward. “Supervisor, I can explain this. Perhaps when we dine tonight, we—”

  “We won’t be dining tonight, Doctor. Don’t you know the Klingon code of not drinking with the enemy? I don’t eat with one, either.”

  That caused the doctor to recoil as if she’d been slapped. “I am not your enemy, Supervisor!”

  “You cured my mother of a poison that I administered at great personal expense. Years of work undone by your treachery! For that, you deserve to die. As for you, Evek—no one will miss you or your crew. You’re a traitor captaining a ship of incompetents.”

  Evek finally found his voice. “Helm, take us out of orbit, evasive action!”

  B’Elanna simply laughed at that.

  The glinn at sensor control said, “Sir, energy readings on the surface are consistent with a nadion-pulse cannon. It’s firing—impact in ten seconds.”

  “Go to warp, now!”

  “Sir, we can’t this close to a gravity well,” the helm officer said. “The risk—”

  Pounding the arm of his chair, Evek cried, “I don’t give a damn about the risk, we need to get out of here! Deactivate safeties! Go to warp before—”

  Evek didn’t live long enough to finish the sentence.

  B’Elanna smiled as the transmission from the Bak’rikan was cut off at the source, along with the Bak’rikan itself. The view on her screen switched to that of a vessel exploding in orbit. She imagined the agonized screams of Evek and B’Oraq as they were incinerated, knowing as they died painfully that all their carefully laid plans were for naught.

  The nadion-pulse cannons had been even more expensive than the poisoning of Miral had been. Luckily, B’Elanna’s petaQ of a mother convinced Command to keep her at an Intendant’s pay scale even though she was demoted to supervisor, so she was able to accumulate the necessary funds. It’s not as if I have much of anything else to spend them on here….

  She went into the computer and erased all traces of her last transmission to the Bak’rikan. If nothing else, she had incriminated herself, and she didn’t particularly want evidence of that in the computer. But I couldn’t resist letting that toDSaH B’Oraq know just how close our “friendship” really was.

  Opportunities to kill her mother were few and far between, and with Miral now assigned to Earth—assuming she lived that long, and that the Regent’s “promotion” wasn’t simply a cover for him to do to her what B’Elanna longed to do—it would be even more difficult.

  But Miral needed to pay. She had brought B’Elanna into this miserable universe, and then conspired to keep her alive in it, even though she had no place. That required punishment.

  For today, though, it was enough that the woman who had saved Miral’s life paid for it.

  Best of all, she thought with a happy smile, I have my very own telepath. If Zimmerman can train the little girl, perhaps I can take my revenge on Miral after all—once I’ve had the alien “convince” the Regent to abdicate and make me ruler of the Alliance….

  8

  W hat is taking so long?”

  Chakotay was beginning to regret providing Neelix with access to Geronimo’s flight deck. Then again, there weren’t too many alternatives. Most of the ship’s space was taken up by cargo and engines. The barracks were a corridor with hammocks strung up, the galley was set in one of the corridor walls, and the mess hall was wherever you happened to be sitting or—more likely—standing when you ate. The only places to send Neelix were the engine room—which wasn’t going to happen, not if Chakotay ever wanted to have sex again—or the cargo bay, which was currently filled with assorted textiles to facilitate their cover as independent traders.

  By way of answering the alien’s question, Chakotay said, “We can’t very well take a direct route from the Badlands to Ardana, we—”

  Neelix, however, was shaking his head contritely. “My apologies, Captain. This entire ordeal has been…difficult for me. You must understand, I spent a long time trying to get Kes away from Jabin, and to succeed, only to have this happen…”

  Before Chakotay could muster up something vaguely comforting to sa
y, Seska, of all people, spoke up. “We’ve all got our reasons for being angry, Neelix. You lost your woman. Chakotay lost his sister. Tuvok lost his wife and children. Harry and Annika both lost their parents. Kate—well, I don’t know what she lost, but I’m sure she lost something. And as for me—I lost my people.” Seska got a faraway look in her eyes. Then she blinked and turned to Neelix. “The trick is to use that anger against them.”

  “I was a soldier once, Ms. Seska. Believe me, I know how to fight when it is necessary.”

  Tuvok was currently in one of the hammocks below, meditating—another old Vulcan tradition he insisted on maintaining. Harry had taken his position on the flight deck, and now he said, “Alliance vessel decloaking ahead! They’re hailing us.”

  Chakotay let out his father’s curse, then said, “On audio.”

  A bored-sounding voice said, “This is Gul Daro of the Alliance scout ship Bok’nor. Please state your reasons for being in this sector.”

  Getting up from his seat, Chakotay said, “Get Tuvok up here.”

  Nodding, Harry opened the intercom and said, “Tuvok, we have company. Get to the flight deck now.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Again nodding, Harry also rose and followed Chakotay.

  “What’s going on?” Neelix asked as Chakotay pulled him toward the door to the flight deck, which slid open.

  “Keeping our cover.” The door slid shut behind them.

  Chakotay and Harry led Neelix into the narrow corridor. They pressed up against the side to let Tuvok pass.

  Once the Vulcan entered the flight deck, Chakotay switched on one of the monitors.

  As Tuvok took his seat, Seska said, “Open a channel.” Once Tuvok did so, she said, “Bok’nor, this is the trading vessel Falrak’s Pride. We’re bringing textiles to Camp Khitomer.”

  Daro still sounded bored. “And you are?”

  Seska grinned at that. “I’m Falrak, of course.”

  “Hm?” Daro sounded like he was distracted by something. “Oh, yes. Alliance regulations require visual communication.”