All things Star Trek belong to Voyager. I’m just taking a few of the characters for a little outing.

Summary: In “Belle Colony,” Chakotay disappears when Voyager returns to Federation space, preferring to be productive elsewhere than face prosecution for his involvement in a fatal Maquis raid on Belle Colony. In this story, we find out what has happened to Chakotay once he is truly on his own.

The Caritas (a Belle Colony story)

by mizvoy

Date: about six months after “Belle Colony”

Chakotay was dying. He lay in an icy pool of water in a deserted shaft of a dilithium mine on Alloran Core and almost smiled at the absurdity of his death. He’d survived so many perilous adventures in his life-twenty years of hazardous Starfleet missions, three years as a Maquis fighting a losing battle against superior forces, seven years stranded in the Delta Quadrant-only to die at the hands of a bounty hunter within spitting distance of Federation space. He could almost laugh at the irony of it.

He thought back to those first moments after Voyager’s return to the Alpha Quadrant, the way his initial elation had been dashed when his clandestine colleague had contacted him by way of a carefully concealed subspace message. When Chakotay had seen the Federation’s irrefutable evidence of his involvement in the Belle Colony disaster, he’d felt something give way in his chest. The security pictures taken inside the Colony’s warehouse were dark and grainy, but his identity was unmistakable, thanks to his distinctive tattoo. Not that he would deny being there; he admitted his involvement in the raid. But their purpose had been to take supplies, not destroy the Colony’s dome. Not murder nearly 300 innocent men, women, and children.

His contact had given him less than six hours to decide what do to-stay on Voyager and spend the rest of his life in a Federation penal colony or escape prosecution and live the rest of his life in exile, doing whatever he could to atone for his guilt. He had lived with that guilt for seven years, and he knew that prison would do nothing to lessen the horrible responsibility he felt for his actions.

He groaned as he asked himself again why he hadn’t he gone to Kathryn with his dilemma. She’d proven herself to be a true, loyal friend, and he trusted her with his life and honor, but he’d stopped short. He’d gone to her ready room as soon as his contact had broken the subspace connection, but when he’d seen her hard at work behind her desk, already struggling with dozens of issues, he’d been unable to add to her already suffocating burden. She’d wanted to celebrate their success with him; he’d wanted to apologize for his lifetime of stupid decisions.

And so he’d said nothing. She had too much to take care of and answer for, including the choices she’d made in a dozen questionable situations, the delicate job of reuniting the crew with the families they hadn’t seen in seven years, the trials for the Maquis and the Equinox members of the crew, and her own shattered life to try to piece together. Even later, when he’d gone to her to explain his disappearance, he’d refused to saddle her with his problem.

But, now, as he struggled to breathe, he wanted so much to talk to her one last time. If he could just hear her voice once more, he would die in peace. She would have been a big help to him. She would have known who to trust, and she would have provided him with Starfleet contacts who were honorable and sincere. At the very least, he should have kept his promise to stay in touch with her. She would have made sure he found a safe and secure location for his exile.

Instead he’d listened to an old friend from the Academy who claimed to have sympathy with Maquis survivors. That misplaced trust had landed him here, in a slave mine, slowly bleeding to death, six short months later. He suspected that there was more to his predicament than he knew, but now he would never find out who had betrayed him. Or why they had done it.

A shadow appeared over him as the night shift supervisor studied his semi-conscious victim. “They’ll still pay if he’s dead, right?”

“Yeah,” came an indistinct reply from further up the shaft. “Reb said dead or alive.”

“Good. I’m glad to get rid of this bastard. He was nothing but trouble, encouraging the workers to fight, demanding better food and board,” the man sneered, and then gave Chakotay a savage kick in the side that sent him spiraling into unconsciousness. “Let’s get something to drink. Reb’ll be here with the money in a couple of hours.”

Gradually, Chakotay became aware of a flickering light. Firelight. And he heard the raucous voices of three drunken men swearing at each other. The warmth from the fire barely reached him, and he could feel the cold seeping into his bones and filling his lungs. His eyes wouldn’t focus as his body shivered with the cold . . . or fever.

He thought of Voyager, of their tireless effort to find a way home. In his delirium, he could almost hear the steady pulse of the warp core, stable as a heartbeat as it kept the ship and their hope alive. When he’d been in trouble out there, he always knew the captain was looking for him, seeking any method available to help him. But this time no one knew where he was, and there would be no rescue. He wouldn’t awaken in sickbay with the doctor on one side of the biobed and Kathryn on the other, smiling down at him in relief.

“You can have him if he ain’t dead yet.” The bounty hunter, an oily human named Reb Johannsen, led the two men down the sloping back yard toward the shack that stood in the damp shadows of a muddy creek. Here, the snow persisted in filthy scraps, and the air was frigid in the weak early morning sun. The shack had once been a barn, and the reek of ancient animal droppings was nearly overpowering as the two men stepped through its dilapidated door.

“That’s him.” Johannsen pointed at a motionless heap of rags in the corner. “The miners weren’t too eager to get rid of him, but I managed to bribe his crew chief. I’m guessing they wanted the reward themselves instead of handing it over to the boss.”

The taller of the two men walked to the corner and used the toe of his boot to push the unconscious man onto his back. Although the light that leaked in through the ruined siding fell across the prisoner’s face, the pale blue lines of a tattoo on his left temple were nearly obscured by dirt, dried blood, and shaggy hair.

“Are you sure he’s alive?” the man asked, raising his own ruined face to glare at Johannsen. He gave the prisoner a solid nudge with the toe of his boot, but the unconscious man didn’t make a sound; a thin line of red drool threaded from his mouth. “A carcass isn’t worth much to me.”

“He was alive yesterday, but if you don’t want him, the other guys’ll pay for him dead or alive.” The mercenary smiled, displaying a mouth full of rotten teeth. “The reward is big enough either way.”

“I’ll double it.”

“He’s yours.”

The credits were exchanged, and the bounty hunter left the men with their dubious purchase. The smaller man knelt by the prisoner and felt his neck for a pulse. He looked up at his partner with a frown. “Weak and thready.”

“Well, let’s get him out of here before it’s too late.”

The prisoner was a large man, but painfully thin, and the two men carried him up the hill between them, draping his arms over their shoulders and letting his feet drag behind them. They laid him in the back of their truck where a Bajoran woman waited to cover him with a blanket and cushion his head with her rolled-up parka.

“He looks dead,” she said, her eyes wide with surprise.

“He will be if we don’t hurry up.”

The men climbed into the cab and started the truck toward town, turning onto a narrow lane as soon as they were no longer visible from the bounty hunter’s cabin. A mile farther, the driver pulled the truck into two ruts leading to a gate and turned off the engine.

“This is where we’re supposed to leave it,” he explained to the tall man. He gestured at the glove compartment. “The communicator is in the stash.”

Once they were beamed onto their orbiting space ship, the tall man, Tom Riker, stood just inside the tiny sickbay as the woman, Ro Laren, began to examine the prisoner.

“Is he Chakotay?”

“What’s left of him,” Laren answered, running a tricorder over his still form. “So far, I can tell that he’s dangerously dehydrated. He’s been brutally beaten and starved. And I think he has pneumonia.” She looked up at Tom. “He needs a real doctor, and fast.”

“We’ll take him home at best speed,” Tom said, heading for the bridge.

Laren stripped the filthy rags from the unconscious man and stuffed them into the recycler with disgust. She used the portable sonic cleaner to remove the dried blood and dirt systematically from his thin frame, shaking her head at his malnourished condition. The bruises and half healed wounds all over his body proved that he had been beaten more than once, yet, as she gently washed his face and hair, his handsome features were unmistakable. She ran her fingers across the wing-like lines that swirled across his forehead.

His dark eyes opened and struggled to focus on her face. “Kathryn?”

“I’m Ro Laren, and I’m here to help you.”

Disoriented and burning with fever, Chakotay let his head fall back on the treatment table as he drifted into unconsciousness.

Reb Johannsen didn’t bother watching his clients leave with their damaged goods; he couldn’t care less whether the half-dead miner lived or not now that he had his credits. He’d made enough money on the deal to live quite handsomely for the next year, and so he spent the next couple of hours making some travel plans.

He was halfway through his second bottle of ale when a message popped up on his comm unit-one of his contacts at the dilithium mine. He activated the screen, looking forward to gloating about the profit he’d made on the miner, but his words died on his lips at the grim visage that greeted him. It was Rosit Mornag, a former competitor who had given up bounty hunting for a much less profitable and less dangerous job-the sale of information.

“That you, Reb?”

“It’s me, Ros,” he replied, giving him a frown and raising his beer bottle in a toast. “And I’m feeling no pain.”

“Neither is Portrand.”

“Guess he’s using his profits for some booze of his own.” Johannsen laughed, thinking of the pittance he’d paid Portrand, the mine’s night shift chief, to smuggle the half-dead human off of the planet.

“Actually,” Rosit replied, looking over his shoulder and lowering his voice to a whisper, “he’s dead.”

“Dead?” Johannsen sat up and tried to shake off the effects of the alcohol. “He looked damned healthy last night.”

“Yeah, well, nobody looks too good after a disappointed Cardassian gets through with him.”

“Why would a Cardy bother with somebody like Portrand?”

“Nobody knows for sure, but we think it had something to do with that human that disappeared from the mine. You know the one.” Rosit winked and looked over his shoulder again. “It turns out that the Federation guys wasn’t the only guys looking for the dude. The Cardies are after him, too.”

“So what.”

“Well, seems Portrand’s boss had already promised him to the Cardy, and when the human turned up missing? Well, the Cardy needed somebody to pay.”

A chill ran through Johannsen’s spine. From the way he was acting, Rosit knew he was the one who’d paid Portrand to turn the human over to him. And that couldn’t be good. “Too bad about Portrand. But why would I care about the human?”

Rosit gave him a knowing smile. “Because the Cardies are paying a nice chunk of credits to find out where the human went, Reb. The Cardies didn’t take kindly to having their property sold out from under them.”

Johannsen swallowed. Rosit’s comm link would tell him exactly where he was located-and Rosit wasn’t above turning in a friend for the right amount of money. “Like I care. Drop dead, Rosit.”

He cut off the transmission and sat for a few moments in the silent cabin, sweat beading on his upper lip.

The Cardy would be after him, too, and soon.

“Is he going to make it?” Riker asked as the Bajoran doctor closed his medkit and pulled the blanket over Chakotay’s chest.

“If we had facilities like they have in the Federation, he’d be up and about in a couple of weeks,” the doctor answered, placing a hand on his patient’s shoulder with a sigh of regret. “But here? It’ll be months before he’s on his feet again.”

“That long?” Riker walked with the doctor through the door and into the chill of a late fall night.

“If he’d spend another day in that shack, Tom, we would’ve been burying him.” The doctor shivered and put down his medkit so he could pull on his jacket and gloves. “Where are you going to hide him? With the sisters?”

Riker nodded. “They have that little apartment on the attic of the house. The kids won’t bother him there, and Tante Marilas is a decent nurse.”

“He’ll just be another orphan to them, I guess.” He picked up the medkit and started toward the small town whose lights were glimmering in the distance. “Keep him warm when you take him over there, and tell Marilas I’ll be checking on him every day for awhile. I’ll tell everybody that one of the babies is sick, in case somebody comes looking for him.”

“Thanks, doc.” He watched the man trudge away, remembering how he had kept so many Maquis alive in the Cardassian prison with little more than blankets and water. “We’re lucky to have you.”

The man just raised his hand in salute and kept walking.

Tom Riker had met Ro Lauren in a Cardassian prison soon after the Dominion War had begun. Together they had orchestrated an escape for a half dozen surviving Maquis and had spent the last few years looking for and rescuing the pitiful few who had lived through the war. They called themselves the Caritas-a word that meant love, value, worth. They were tireless in their rescue efforts, although the number of Maquis to be saved had nearly dried up.

They had heard of Chakotay’s escape had six months earlier, thanks to the newsvids that carried Voyager’s spectacular return, but because they avoided contact with the Federation, they’d been unable to help him escape. Like everyone else, they had been unable to track him down until, just a couple of weeks earlier, they heard rumors of a rebellious, angry dilithium miner who had a bird wing tattoo on his forehead. Even though they moved quickly to find him, it was a miracle that they had found him while he was still alive.

Ro Laren stepped out of the building and looked up at the stars. “We’ll want to get him over to the farm before the sun comes up.”

Riker nodded. “Do the sisters know he’s coming?”

“Barlon went over there while the doc was fixing up Chakotay. Marilas is getting the room cleaned up for him. She said the sooner the better, before the children are up and asking questions.”

“We can’t keep calling him Chakotay, Laren, not as long as he has a price on his head. If somebody overhears the name and makes the connection . . . the bounty hunters would come after him, and they wouldn’t care who they hurt in the process. ”

“The ones from the Federation? Or the Cardassians?”

Riker shook his head in dismay. “I’m not sure. The Feds are after him for his involvement in Belle Colony. But the Cardies? I thought they’d given up on punishing the Maquis.”

“Maybe they want to turn him over to the Federation, too?”

“Could be, I guess.” Riker sighed and started walking back toward the building.

“In the Maquis,” Ro said, falling into step beside him, “some of the men from Dorvan called him ‘Tyee.’ I think it means ‘king fish’ or ‘chief.'”

“Tyee, then.” He pulled his jacket tighter around him. “Did he say anything during the trip here?”

“A couple of words-‘Kathryn’ and ‘captain’-he was delirious with fever, so I don’t know if they mean anything.'”

“He must have meant Janeway, his captain from Voyager.” He paused at the door of the building, looking back at the strengthening light of dawn. “He would’ve been better off trusting her than whoever it was that helped him escape.”

“They left him much too close to Alloran Core. They must’ve known that the slavers would get him.”

“Maybe that’s what they wanted, Laren. Maybe they wanted him to disappear for good.”

The sun rose over the trees as Riker and Barlon lifted the unconscious Chakotay from the stretcher into the tiny attic room’s bed. Tante Marilas hovered over them, begging them to be gentle and studying the man who would be her patient. She was a small woman and quite old, nearly eighty years of age, but she was healthy and vigorous, even though she was the oldest of three sisters who ran the farm.

The huge, rambling farmhouse was a relic from better days when the sisters’ parents had owned all the fields and the surrounding hills as far as the eye could see. Their property had produced a bounty of crops and herds of cattle, enough to make their family rich-and enough to lure the Cardassians into seizing their farm to feed their troops.

During their forty years of occupation, the Cardassians had managed to damage the planet’s environment so badly that the farm barely produced enough to feed the sisters and the twelve orphans they had taken into their home. But, at least they were able to eke out a meager existence. There were other farms that would never produce a crop again.

Riker stood up and ran his hand over his face. It had been a long night, and he was so exhausted he felt sick to his stomach. “The bag has the hyposprays he needs to keep him alive-medicine and glucose. The doc said he’d be out every day until he’s better, so he’ll bring you anything else you’ll need. I’m afraid you’ll have to clean him up until he’s able to take care of himself.”

“It’s our honor to tend to him,” she replied, tucking the blanket around her patient’s still form with care. “He was a member of the Maquis?”

“Yes, a cell leader, in fact. He’s a good man, Marilas.” This was not the first injured man he’d left in her car, and he knew she still remembered each of them because she often asked about their conditions. Her years of servitude under the Cardassians and made her into a generous, courageous, and hard-working angel of mercy. “He’s an honorable man.”

“I look forward to hearing his stories once he’s better. Come,” she said, gesturing to the tiny table near the window. “Tell me what you know of him so that I can better comfort him as he regains consciousness.”

Riker told her the story of Chakotay’s life, or what he knew of it.

“Just before his ship was assigned to the Badlands, he took part in a Maquis raid that ended in unexpected disaster. They were raiding a small Federation settlement, Belle Colony, for supplies. It was to be a quick in-and-out job, but as they left, the Colony’s dome collapsed, killing nearly three hundred people. The Federation is convinced that the Maquis destroyed the dome on purpose. The Maquis swear it was an accident.” He sighed in despair. “If Chakotay hadn’t been warned in advance by a sympathetic Starfleet officer, he would have been arrested and charged with capital murder as soon as Voyager docked.”

“If he was innocent, if it was an accident, why did he run away?” she wondered, caught up in the awful tragedies of the poor man’s life. “Why not stay and tell the truth?”

“There’s a law in the Federation that any death that occurs during the commission of a crime is considered capital murder. They claim to have images of Chakotay and the others taking supplies from the colony just before the disaster occurred.” He finished his tea and sighed. “I imagine he’d rather be out here atoning for his wrongs than sitting in a prison feeling guilty for the rest of his life.”

“And the others who were with him on the raid? What happened to them?”

“All lost, Marilas. Some killed by the Cardassians, others during the war.”

She nodded her head solemnly. “And so he’s a wanted man.”

“Yeah, the Federation put a bounty on his head.” Riker leaned back in his chair and tried not to yawn. His eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep. “He had help in escaping from Federation space, but once he was outside their borders, he was completely on his own. A single man struggling to find his way in the frontier is in constant danger.”

“The slavers trapped him, I assume?”

Riker nodded. “I imagine they offered him a decent job on a starship or a colony, only to sell him into slavery once he was in their grasp. At least, that’s what they usually do. We haven’t been able to talk to him yet.”

“And where did they take him?”

“He went to the dilithium mine at Alloran Core, a hellhole only a little less deadly than Rura Penthe. The miners there usually last six months. Chakotay wouldn’t have lasted that long.”

“Oh, the poor man.” She glanced at the unconscious man with sympathy.

“It was just a matter of time before the miners killed him or turned him in for the reward. We were lucky to find a someone with contacts on the inside.” Tom rubbed his face again. “We shouldn’t use his real name, Marilas. Call him Tyee. And if the children see him, cover up the tattoo. It’s an identifying mark that they might innocently mention to someone who’s looking for him.”

“I understand.” She stood up, bringing their talk to a close. “You’re very tired and need to get some sleep, and it’s time for me to help my sisters prepare the children’s breakfast.”

Riker stood up. “You realize that you’re taking a chance by having Tyee here, you and the children.”

“I won’t let danger keep me from giving help to those who need it.” She smiled sadly. “And, I have taken bigger chances in my life, Mr. Riker.”

He nodded, his eyes glowing with admiration. “We have some supplies for you and the orphans-food and clothing, a little medicine. Borlan will bring them by later today, if that’s all right.”

“Oh, I am so thankful. You and the rest of the Caritas have been good to us, Mr. Riker. I’m pleased to repay you in this small way.”

Marilas watched Riker make his way down the stairs, and then she moved to the tiny window and saw him collapse into the vehicle where his partner sat dozing. Checking the time, she quickly straightened up the room and sat down beside the unconscious man, gently attaching a monitor to his forehead that would keep her informed of his condition while she was in the lower floors of the house.

“Tyee, welcome,” she said, cupping his cheek with her hand as she smiled at his handsome face. “Welcome to our home, and welcome to the Caritas.”

Chakotay groaned when her cool hand touched his skin, his eyes fluttering open. “Kathryn?” he mumbled, struggling to see who had touched him. “You found me?”

“Yes, Chakotay,” she whispered, using his name to comfort him. “You know I would never desert you.”

He relaxed into the bed, feeling safe and secure, at last. Kathryn hadn’t forgotten him. She was still there. His captain. His friend. His beloved Kathryn. He drifted into sleep with her name on his lips.