The Brave and the Bold Book Two - Keith R. A. DeCandido [0]
2371
This portion of the story takes place several weeks before the Star Trek: Voyager pilot episode “Caretaker,” and shortly before the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Double Helix Book 4: Quarantine.
Chapter One
THARIA DIDN’T CRY when his three mates died.
It had been nine months, and not a single tear had run down his blue cheek.
He sat with two of his fellow Maquis rebels in a cave on some planet or other. Tharia wasn’t even sure where they were, to be honest. He’d been too busy trying to repair one of the consoles to pay attention to wherever it was that they had crash-landed their shuttle. There had been four of them, but their pilot—a Bolian who had replaced Tom Paris after the imbecile Earther had gotten himself caught by the Federation—died in the crash. That left Tharia ch’Ren, Gerron Ral, and B’Elanna Torres.
“When’s Chakotay supposed to get here?” Gerron asked in a whiny voice that made Tharia want to strangle him.
“He’ll get here soon,” B’Elanna snapped in a voice intended to intimidate. She didn’t bother to look at Gerron. She was too busy keeping her eyes glued to her ancient tricorder, hoping it would tell her of Chakotay’s imminent arrival with their ship, hoping it wouldn’t tell her that Gul Evek or some other Cardassian had found them and was going to blast them into atoms.
At least their mission had been more or less successful. The shipment of grenades that Cardassian Central Command had earmarked for occupying forces on Dorvan V had been annihilated, first stolen from the freighter that was taking them to Dorvan, then destroyed an hour later in the shuttle crash. (Mercifully, the grenades hadn’t been primed yet; had they been, more than the Bolian pilot would have been lost, and Chakotay would only have been able to find their remains with a tricorder—or tweezers.)
It would have been better if they had managed to keep the grenades intact and thus be able to add them to the Maquis’s arsenal, but the important thing was that the Cardassians wouldn’t be able to use them. Sometimes it didn’t matter if you won, so long as the other side lost.
“It’s going to be dark soon.” Gerron, Tharia noted, sounded wholly unintimidated—which meant he was a fool, as B’Elanna’s actions generally spoke louder than her words, and her words were fairly high in volume. “And with all our supplies trashed, we’ll have to forage. I don’t know if there’s anything here we can even eat, much less—”
Tharia stood up, running a hand through his feathery white hair. “Oh, for Thori’s sake, I’ll go look for food.” He looked down at Gerron. “If you want to make yourself useful, gather up some rocks that we can heat.”
“Rocks?”
“Basic survival.” Tharia sighed. “Did they teach you nothing on Bajor? You can use a phaser on rocks to heat them.”
Gerron at least had the decency to look abashed. “Sorry. Forgot,” he muttered.
Looking over at the half-Klingon, half-Earther engineer, Tharia said, “I’ll be back soon.”
B’Elanna only grunted, focused as she was on the tricorder. Knowing that was all the acknowledgment he’d get, Tharia headed outward toward the cave entrance in the hopes of finding something edible. Given that three—four, really, given B’Elanna’s halfbreed nature—species were represented in the cave, it would be a challenge. Andorians, Bajorans, Earthers, and Klingons didn’t have similar eating habits, after all. But Tharia didn’t care that much—he mainly needed to get away from Gerron before the young Bajoran drove him to anger.
Tharia preferred to keep his emotions in check.
His zhavey had cried, of course, back then. It took very little for her to cry, truth be told, and the deaths of her chei’ s three mates was certainly more than a little. And several of his friends cried.
But Tharia didn’t. Not when he found their broken, bloody bodies in the wreckage of their home on Beaulieu’s World after the Cardassian bomb had destroyed it, not at the death rites held at the community center on Beaulieu’s, not at the ceremony back home on Andor.
Ignoring the advice of his zhavey to