Caretaker - L. A. Graf [15]
"Tom Paris, reporting on board." Paris announced himself with an easy confidence Kim envied, even when it earned the older man a glare of pure disapproval from the ill-tempered physician.
"Oh, yes... the..." What could only be disgust twisted the doctor's full mouth. "... `observer'..."
Paris nodded, grin in place but eyes wary. "That's me." He waited a moment, letting the silence between them stretch until Kim felt almost compelled to break it. Then, just before the ensign would have interfered, Paris remarked jauntily to Fitzgerald, "As a matter of fact, I seem to be observing some kind of problem right now...
Doctor."
Fitzgerald flashed a grin that never even showed his teeth, much less any true emotion. "I was a surgeon at the hospital on Caldik Prime the same time you were stationed there." Something closer to delight glittered in the doctor's eyes at whatever happened to Paris's expression. But when Kim glanced quickly up at his companion, he could find nothing but Paris's smile. "We never actually met," the doctor went on.
Paris nodded as though that explained everything, but said nothing.
Fitzgerald turned away from him to toy with a data chip on an exam table nearby. "Your medical records arrived from your last...
`posting,' Mr. Paris." He looked at Paris over the chip.
"I think everything's in order. The captain asked if you're on board.
You should check in with her."
"I haven't paid my respects to the captain yet, either." Kim tugged gingerly at Paris's elbow, silently urging him to take the out they'd been given before the air got too thick with tension to breathe.
"Well, Mr. Kim," Fitzgerald told him, apparently thinking the same thing, "that would be a good thing for the new operations officer to do."
Yeah, and the hell with you, too, Kim caught himself thinking.
He ducked into the corridor in an agony of dismay, wondering insanely what his mother would say to hear him entertaining such impolite thoughts about his superiors. Waiting for the door to hush shut behind them, he looked up at Paris and asked, "What was that all about?"
To his surprise, Paris only sighed and clapped him on the back.
"It's a long story, Harry, and I'm tired of telling it." He tried out a grin too tired to make it to his eyes. "I'm sure someone around here will tell you before long."
The only problem was, Kim wasn't entirely sure it would be something he wanted to hear.
Chapter 4
Too much to do. Far, far too much to do, and not even an hour now until launch. Janeway blinked herself back from another mental tally of the subspace queues she still had to sort through, and found herself staring at two mugs of coffee in the tray of the ready-room replicator with no memory of having ordered either one. It was Mark's voice over the monitor behind her, she realized with a pang of bittersweet amusement. When he was over for one of her all-night preparatory binges, they always took turns fetching coffee for each other. She called up a mug for him by habit. Only this time, she couldn't pass it over to him, or receive his kiss in return.
Picking up one of the warm ceramic cups, she did her best to tuck a few stray data padds under her arm so she wouldn't have to make two trips.
Even so, she had to let the padds fall into a shamefully disorganized pile on the table she'd commandeered as she settled her coffee safely beyond the reach of her elbows.
"The doctor called," Mark told her, as though she'd never walked thoughtlessly out of his sight in the middle of his previous sentence.
He was used to this sort of chaos just before a mission, Janeway knew.
She took a sip of coffee and picked up the first in a deep pile of reports. "And... ?"
"And," he announced smugly, "I was right."
Janeway had to swallow fast to keep from burning her tongue.
"She's pregnant?!"
The smile on his face was infuriating enough to have earned him a pinched