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Doubt and confusion played across Janeway’s face as she tried to push her own heart out of the way and consider this choice only from Tuvok’s point of view.

Finally she offered a weak, semi-serious “I could make it an order.”

“You could,” he replied.

“But though that might change your course of action, it would not change your choice, would it?” she asked.

“It would not,” he replied.

Removing her hand, she looked directly into his eyes and said, “I will miss you. But I would not deny you this. Goodbye… my friend.”

“Goodbye… Kathryn,” he replied. “Live long and prosper.”

Without another word, she turned and rushed from sickbay.

Ensign Clayton was halfway through her third straight duty shift in transporter room three when Janeway entered, slinging a modified phaser rifle over her shoulder. Clayton had followed the away team’s progress from the Betasis into the first ring. But once they had used the alien transporters to move to the second ring, she had lost a stable lock.

She had noted with surprise and relief when Chakotay’s team had activated a set of pattern enhancers within the second ring. She watched, bleary-eyed, for the first moment she might detect their signals within the range of the enhancers, certain that their arrival there might indicate a need for a rapid evacuation, and she had no intention of disappointing them.

Clayton was the first in her family to enter the Academy. The second daughter, one of three children, she had been taken to Bajor by her parents when she and her siblings were just toddlers. Because her parents were Federation citizens not affiliated with Starfleet, the Cardassian authorities had granted them permission to work as teachers within the occupied territories. This was one of many positive faces they tried to put on the Occupation for many years. But Clayton knew intimately the true methods and means of the Cardassians, and their unspoken determination to crush Bajor’s people and civilization. Her sister and brother had died fighting for the resistance not long after their parents had been stripped of their status as “neutral advisors” and thrown into a labor camp. Clayton had been smuggled off on a cargo vessel and, once returned to the safety of the home of her father’s sister on Earth, had immediately transmitted her application to Starfleet Academy. The years on Bajor had left an indelible mark upon her spirit. Human by birth, a Starfleet officer by choice, in her heart she was, and always would be, Bajoran.

Voyager had been her first assignment, and Clayton had done her best by Captain Janeway. She had served for four years in relative obscurity as a nameless, faceless, but nonetheless integral part of Voyager’s survival up to this point.

“Ensign,” Janeway barked as she entered, “do you currently have a lock on Commander Chakotay’s position?”

“No, ma’am,” she replied. “His last known location was section fifty-seven epsilon of the second ring, where he activated a set of pattern enhancers, but I haven’t had a clear signal for the past eleven minutes.”

“Show me that section of the array,” Janeway requested, stepping shoulder-to-shoulder with Clayton to examine the display. As she pondered the schematic, Janeway said softly, “Where was he headed?”

“There is a large storage bay only a few hundred meters from the pattern enhancers, Captain,” Clayton offered. “I believe that was his intended destination.”

“What’s in that storage bay?” Janeway asked.

Overlaying a sensor display on the schematic, Clayton answered, “There are muted biosignatures and… oh, my… “

“What is it?”

“The multiphasic activity in that room is off the charts.”

“What does that mean, Ensign?”

“We’ve been tracking the life-forms Commander Chakotay discovered, and from the looks of it, almost all of them are now located in the storage bay where the away team was headed.”

“Can you transport me directly there?” Janeway asked.

“Maybe.”

Janeway raised an eyebrow. Clayton knew full well that when the captain posed a question she was accustomed to receiving either a definitive answer or a lot