Pathways - Jeri Taylor [38]
He sat on the forest floor, sobbing, as his father knelt by him and held him. He cried out his pain, and his loss, and his confusion, and when he was done he looked up at Kolopak with swollen eyes, and saw his father smiling at him.
“Things will be better now,” he promised, and Chakotay knew that, as usual, his father was absolutely right.
The arrival of several new people to the Liberty was the beginning of a series of problems. Each of them had their strengths, to be sure, but their presence caused other difficulties which, although subtle, were to have a far-reaching impact on the crew.
The first was B’Elanna Torres, the half-Klingon engineer they rescued from Cardassians. She brought a wealth of technical expertise to the group, but her arrival seemed to send Seska into a paroxysm of jealousy. Seska tried to disguise it, and insisted she had nothing but the highest regard for B’Elanna, but it was clear she was deeply threatened by this new female presence.
The recruiting of Tom Paris to the Liberty was a move Chakotay at first approved, then gradually came to regret. He was a first-rate pilot, but he had an arrogance that was annoying, and Chakotay also began to wonder if he could be trusted. He’d lied about the deaths of three of his friends in order to save himself from censure; he lacked strong character. And it was clear he was attracted to B’Elanna, which only served to complicate the tangled emotional relationships he had to deal with.
When Chakotay had heard there was a disenchanted Starfleet Vulcan who might be interested in becoming a freedom fighter, he responded with alacrity. He’d had a Vulcan on board earlier, a pilot named Setonak who had returned to his home planet to recover from wounds, and Chakotay had always appreciated the calm and steadying presence on his bridge. Tuvok was much the same, a seasoned and unflappable veteran whose cold logic Chakotay found valuable, especially among this group of hotheaded rebels.
Things had come to a head with Tom Paris fairly early on. Chakotay had ordered the ship for its first foray into Cardassian territory, a short reconnaissance run to test the perimeter for defensive measures. Things had gone well and they had actually gathered some data on a weapons depot that was secreted on a small moon, and were heading back to the demilitarized zone when they stumbled on a surveillance probe.
“It’s scanning us,” said B’Elanna from her post on the bridge.
“Send out a polaron beam, see if you can block the scan—” Chakotay had begun, when suddenly the probe exploded before their eyes.
“What was that?” B’Elanna asked.
“That was me,” replied Tom Paris, with the cocky edge to his voice that Chakotay had come to dislike.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I fired on it. Took it out.”
Chakotay’s wrath began to well up, though he tried to keep his voice calm. “I don’t remember ordering you to do that.”
“I took it on myself—”
“On my bridge I give the orders. You don’t take it on yourself to do anything. Is that clear?”
A flush emerged on Tom’s cheeks, and Chakotay knew he was angry as well. “I didn’t realize this was a mini-Starfleet. I thought we were expected to think on our feet.”
The fact that Paris was challenging him in front of the others added to Chakotay’s ire. “Thinking is one thing. Acting without an order is another. All you’ve managed to do is alert the Cardassians that we’re here. Stop arguing with me and start getting us the hell out of here.”
The two men held a bitter look for a long moment, then Tom finally turned away and began working his controls. From that point on, things were tense between them, until the point that Tom abandoned them. It was good riddance as far as Chakotay was concerned.
Of course, that was all before the great adventure that had changed their lives, before the flight into the