Disclaimer: All things Star Trek belong to Paramount. The story, however, is mine.

Summary: Exiled to a deep space assignment because of her continued investigation into the Belle Colony disaster, Admiral Kathryn Janeway discovers that it is no fun to be in a war zone.

Tangled Web (part of the Belle Colony universe)

By mizvoy

Three months after “Siberia.”

“Let’s catch our breath while we decide what to do next.” Admiral Kathryn Janeway ducked into a lateral hallway of the dilapidated Toroyan space station while the other two survivors joined her, both of them gasping for oxygen in the thin atmosphere. In the distance, she could hear the aftermath of the attack on Ambassador Tydkt and the rest of the negotiating team, random phaser fire and an occasional shout of triumph, and it was all she could do to refrain from yelling down the hallway, “I told you so!”

“It won’t be long before the Toroyans figure out we escaped,” her security chief, Marci Brooks warned her as she leaned over and pressed her hands against her thigh. “We have to decide what to do quickly.”

“Are you hurt?” Janeway put a hand on Brooks’ shoulder. “You seem to be in pain.”

“Some of the debris hit me in the leg,” she nodded, struggling against pain to take a deep breath. “I’m afraid I’m going to slow you down.”

“Maybe the Hyperion can beam us out from here.” Their attempt to reach the ship from outside the conference room had failed, Janeway guessed from some sort of jamming device, and she hoped that they’d moved far enough away to be successful now. Scowling when the communications link failed, she pulled out her tricorder and discovered a complete block of communications and even more bad news. “Damn. There’s no way we can transport out, Commander. The station’s shields are up.” She gave Brooks an exasperated look. “I thought the shields were inoperative on this old bucket.”

“They are . . . or they were first thing this morning. I beamed over and supervised the security sweep myself, Admiral.” Brooks’ face flushed with embarrassment. The space station had been deserted for nearly ten years, since the beginning of the Union/Toroyan war, and only minimal life support and power had been restored for this brief meeting with the Federation. “They must have repaired the shielding during the meeting.”

“What really matters at this point is getting the shields down so the Hyperion can beam us out of here in one piece.” Janeway studied the computer access on the station’s wall, gratified to see it activate with her touch. “Maybe we can tap into the computer and get detailed schematics for the station?”

“Let me try.” Brooks started a deeper access of the computer. “But we’ll have to hurry. They’ll see my access and realize that at least some of the delegation survived the bombing.”

Janeway watched her work a moment and then looked down at the man slumped on the floor at her feet. Kazuo Katsumata, Tydkt’s youthful personal assistant, was an emotional wreck, visibly trembling as he cried into his hands. “Are you all right, Kazuo?”

He looked up at her, his eyes huge in a face that was smeared with blood. “If Tydkt hadn’t sent me to find you, Admiral, I’d be dead, too.”

“You’re bleeding.” She knelt beside him, gently turning his head with her hands as she looked for the source of the blood. Katsumata had been closest to the ambassador when the explosion occurred. If Brooks had been injured by stray debris, chances were good that he had been injured, as well. “Where is this blood coming from?”

He looked miserable. “I’m pretty sure it’s the ambassador’s blood, not mine.”

“Here,” she said, pulling loose the sash he wore draped across his shoulders. “Wipe the blood away with this.” Janeway’s first impulse was to ignore the trauma caused by their brush with death and focus instead on their immediate problem of surviving, but the young man was not as practiced at crisis management. While her training made her instinctively repress the memory of the five mangled bodies in the ruined conference room, Katsumata was still reliving it, still seeing the horror of it in his mind’s eye. Step one in getting him to move past it would be to get the evidence of the ambassador’s death off of his face and hands.

“I never thought something like that would happen.”

Janeway gave him a grim smile. “Well, they say that the people in the diplomatic corps wear a big target on their backs. They’re fair game for anyone who has a gripe with Federation policy.”

“We were lucky to get away.”

She nodded. The smoke and confusion swirling from the primitive bomb had covered their escape through the rear passageway, but it had also prevented Janeway from seeing who had been responsible for the assassination. Whoever they were, they were too busy celebrating their victory to realize that three of their victims had managed to escape into the bowels of the station. Luckily, their jamming device also reduced the effectiveness of the station’s internal sensors.

“Admiral, we have to leave this deck.” Brooks tore her eyes from the wall panel as her tricorder downloaded the schematics of the station’s maze of passageways. “Shield control is in engineering, three decks down.”

“And life support is working on that deck, too?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Toroyans restored power to this deck and the two below it.”

“All right. With any luck, this jamming device will be located in engineering, too.” Janeway stood up and studied the opposite wall, noticing a familiar-looking removable panel. “Will that access tube take us where we need to go?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brooks replied, snapping the tricorder shut. “I’ll get started on opening it.”

While Brooks struggled with the panel, Janeway turned back to Katsumata, reminding herself that he was a young, inexperienced civilian employee on his first assignment. He wasn’t a Starfleet officer who had been trained to keep a level head in the midst of disaster, and he was probably facing death for the first time. Her heart went out to him as she gave him his marching orders. “Kazuo, come on. We have to go.”

“The ambassador should have listened to you,” he whispered as he stood up, tossing aside the blood soaked sash. “He was too proud, too sure of a miraculous success. I can see that now.”

“He paid for his mistake,” she answered, feeling a stab of pain for the four others he’d taken with him. “Let’s just be sure nobody else does.”

She’d argued long and hard against this perilous meeting with the Toroyans, against trusting the Toroyans at all, since her arrival six weeks earlier. They might have lost the war against the Union, but they weren’t about to stop fighting, and they would jump at the chance to strike out at the Federation that they believed had somehow tipped the balance in the Union’s favor.

But, then, she didn’t much like the Unionists, either. While she might be paranoid, she sensed a reticence in their treatment of her, an unwillingness to be open and candid about the war and their developing relationship with the Federation. Because of that, she hadn’t asked her counterparts about Union ships detected near Belle Colony or whether they, too, were experimenting with phased cloaks.

“The Toroyans think we are Unionist allies,” she stated flatly. “They believe we helped the Union defeat them.”

“It’s not true, and you know it,” Tydkt had insisted. “We’ve done nothing to help the Union win the war.”

“Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that a fanatic won’t believe it’s true anyway,” Janeway had countered. “We aren’t a disinterested party as far as they’re concerned, Ambassador. Just look at your behavior over the last two years. You’ve never met with them, preferring to stay in Union territory and on Union facilities.”

“Who would stay on a Toroyan facility if they had a choice in the matter? Have you seen the conditions they live in?” Tydtk had laughed. “I realize that a single Starfleet ship in Toroyan space will be vulnerable, but with all your experience captaining a solitary ship in hostile territory, you’ll find a way to keep us safe.”

“I’m not a miracle worker.” She resented the way he prejudged her abilities based on what he imagined the Delta Quadrant had been like. She wanted to inform him that she’d only played against the odds when she’d had no other choice, and that the experience had terrified her, but he was never interested in a reality that forced him to change his preconceived notions. “I would never have taken Voyager into a situation as treacherous as this. No ship is safe when the enemy has nothing left to lose, sir. I can make no guarantee that we won’t be attacked. And if we are, I don’t think we can survive.”

“Your humility is touching, but I have faith in your abilities.” He’d waved her off with a dismissive gesture, and she’d stormed back to her office to write a blistering message to Starfleet command, even though she knew she’d receive little or no support for her position. Ultimately, Tydkt had gotten his way, and he and four others were dead as a result.

“Got it,” Brooks reported as she lowered the panel to the floor. “Once you two climb through, I’ll put the panel back so they won’t know where you disappeared to.”

Janeway stared at the woman who had been her only real ally since she’d arrived at her new assignment. “Marci, what are you saying?”

“They’re getting closer, Admiral. Can’t you hear them?” Brooks peered into the shadowy passageway. “They’ll know we accessed their computer from this location. If they see me running away, they’ll follow me instead of stopping here. That should give you more time to escape.”

“I’m not leaving you behind,” Janeway said, pushing back panic she felt at Brook’s sacrifice. “I can’t let you do this.”

“Admiral, I’m pretty sure my leg is broken. There’s no way I can climb through that hatch and down the ladder.” She put a reassuring hand on Janeway’s shoulder and gave her the tricorder that held the station’s schematics. “When you get to engineering and drop the shields, Hyperion can beam me out at the same time they do you.”

Janeway pulled the commander into a fierce hug, both of them unwilling to admit that Brooks probably wouldn’t survive long enough to be rescued. “You’re a fine officer and a wonderful friend, Marci.”

Brooks pulled away and then picked up the panel. “Get going, you two. I have to get this back in place and be ready to lure those bastards away from here.”

Katsumata, who was still too stunned to realize what the Starfleet officers had been arguing about, climbed into the tunnel. “How far down?” he asked, his face framed by the access port.

“Three decks,” Janeway said, waiting for him to descend and then crawling in behind him. She paused as Brooks rested the panel on the bottom ledge and gazed at her commanding officer with a look of calm resignation in her eyes. “Stay alive, Marci. I’ll scan for you.”

“I know you will, Admiral,” she smiled, an affectionate look in her eyes. “I’ve loved serving with you, ma’am. Tuvok told me you were a great boss, but he didn’t do you justice.”

Too distressed to reply, Janeway nodded and headed down the ladder as the panel slid into place, plunging them into a murky darkness that was weakly moderated by the glow of the emergency lighting system. Beneath her, Katsumata said, “How do I get this panel open?”

Janeway rolled her eyes. “Climb past it, Kazuo. I’ll get it open, go through, and then you can climb back up and join me.”

The lower deck was dark and icy, barely habitable. Before she replaced the panel, Janeway searched inside the tunnel for an emergency light, relieved to find one that was conveniently placed just inside the entry. She snapped it on, set it on the floor, and looked at Katsumata. “Help me put this panel back.”

He complied without comment, but she saw that he was shivering with cold and fear, not only completely out of his element, but also in shock. She was on her own, unable to count on him for support, and so she had to think clearly.

Katsumata’s voice was faint when he asked, “What now?”

“Now we figure out how to get to engineering.” She picked up the light and used it to study the schematics on her tricorder, conscious of the man’s gaze. She glanced up at the markings on the wall and then started down the passage. “Follow me.”

Tydkt had left her standing when she entered his office instead of asking her to take a seat, but she wasn’t about to be intimidated by his formality. No matter what happened, she had to be sure her opposition to the upcoming meeting with the Toroyans was a matter of record.

Tydkt glanced up from his computer, gazing at her over his antique reading glasses with a look of annoyance. “Well, Admiral? What do you want?”

“I’ve studied the proposed location for this meeting carefully, Ambassador, and I don’t like it one bit. Temporarily reactivating a deserted station sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.”

“The Toroyan leaders prefer to avoid the Union border.”

“I can understand their fears, but the station is too deep in Toroyan space, and going there in a single ship is too risky. I can’t in good conscience approve of this unless Starfleet sends at least two more ships as official escorts. No harm would be done if we postpone this meeting for a few days.”

Tydkt’s face turned crimson with fury. “The diplomatic ‘harm’ of such cowardice is mine to determine, Admiral.”

“Sir,” she replied, struggling to keep her own temper in check, ” there’s a big difference between cowardice and caution, a difference that can also be a matter of life and death.”

“You’ve been quite adamant that a personal meeting with the rebels is long overdue, and I’ve decided that you have a valid point. I’m in no mood to delay.” He took off his reading glasses and laid them on the desk, looking up at her with an air of tolerant dismay, as if he were lecturing a cadet on the rudimentary elements of diplomacy. “I assure you that we have nothing to fear from the Toroyans. They’ve lost the war! Their military is in shambles, without even one respectable starship at their disposal. Hyperion is more than a match for them.”

She felt her face grow warm with anger. “With all due respect, sir, it’s my job to advise you on military matters, and I’m telling you that taking a single ship this deep into their space is too dangerous. What if they throw a dozen ships at us? What if one ship decides to make a suicide attack? These fanatics won’t hesitate to sacrifice their lives to bring down a Federation ambassador and embarrass Starfleet.”

He studied her in an increasingly uncomfortable silence. “Frankly, Janeway, I’m surprised at you-the Hero of Voyager. I specifically asked that you be assigned here because of your experience in fluid situations like this.” He looked her over so carefully that she wondered if he was checking her uniform for coffee stains. “You, of all people, should know what a single ship can do, Admiral.”

She leaned on his desk, bringing her face to his level so she could look him right in the eye. “And I know even better what a single ship cannot do, Ambassador.”

They glared at each other for a long moment before Tydkt shrugged and gave her a sly smile, leaning back in his chair for some much-needed space. “You have your orders,” he said, dismissing her with a wave of her hand. “You haven’t forgotten how to obey orders, I assume.”

She straightened up, struggling to hold her temper and gain control of her voice. Finally, in despair, she said, “Yes, sir. I remember how to follow orders. But, in this case, I do so under protest.”

“Do what you must.” He sneered at her. “I’m terribly displeased with your cowardice and pessimism. Upon our return from the Toroyan meeting, you should plan on yet another reassignment.”

She narrowed her eyes. “If I live that long, Ambassador, I’ll welcome a transfer.”

She turned and left the room without looking back.

She loved having the last word.

Janeway picked her way through the station’s maze of corridors with the flashlight in one hand and the schematics in the other, Katsumata so close behind her she could almost feel his breath on the back of her neck. He whispered, “Couldn’t we just hide and wait for them to find us?”

“Which ‘them’ are you expecting will find us, Kazuo?”

“Why, Captain Schuler! The Hyperion! I’m sure they noticed the explosion.”

“Of course they did. But I’m afraid that if we don’t keep moving, the Toroyans will find us before they do.” She paused at a juncture and looked both ways, struggling to get her bearings. “I think we’d better turn left. We’ll follow this corridor around and then make a right.”

“Couldn’t the captain just beam us out?”

Janeway sighed, reminding herself of Katsumata’s youth and inexperience. “Once we get the shields down, he’ll do just that.”

The young man seemed satisfied with her reassuring words, and Janeway was glad she had kept her own skepticism from him. With communications jammed, they hadn’t heard anything from Schuler since before the explosion, and not knowing what was going on outside the station had her worried. It was likely that the ship had come under attack as soon as the station’s shields had come up and the explosion occurred. Otherwise, Schuler would have already beamed them out or sent in a team in to rescue them. It made sense that the assassins had two goals in mind: eliminate a “partisan” ambassador and seize a powerful Federation ship for their own use.

Janeway arrived at the next turn and stopped to think. She was shivering in the cold and could hear the unmistakable sound of teeth chattering behind her. “We’d better look around for an emergency supply locker before we go any farther.”

Unused facilities were usually left stocked with minimal emergency supplies for use in case of need, and Janeway hoped to find a few necessities still available. The tricorder identified a nearby locker, and they quickly opened it and examined the contents. While most of its supplies had been ransacked, they found a couple of thermal jumpsuits, some emergency rations, and another flashlight, all of which were desperately needed.

“Well, this is a start.” Janeway stepped into the oversized jumpsuit, grateful for the warmth it provided her, even if it would fit a Nausican.

Katsumata put on the second suit and gave her a shy grin as she rolled up the sleeves and legs on her own. “I don’t think that’s your size, Admiral.”

She laughed and shrugged. “Just my luck. Many people underestimate me because of my small stature.” She smiled back at him as she stood up and explored the pockets of the suit, slipping the rations into one on her hip and an extra power cell into another. “We’ll need more supplies, so I’ll put you in charge of finding another locker as we go.”

“Good idea,” he replied, his eyes serious. “Commander Brooks might need a jumpsuit, too, when she catches up with us.”

Janeway put a hand on Katsumata’s shoulder and looked at him with maternal affection. Did he really think Marci would survive without being killed or captured? Not even Harry Kim had been so naïve and trusting when he’d reported to Voyager, but she knew that this wasn’t the time to disabuse him of his innocence “Yes, you’re right,” she agreed, and then she moved past him down the corridor. “We’d better hurry.”

They hadn’t gone far when they were suddenly thrown to the floor by a powerful jolt that rocked the station and momentarily disrupted its artificial gravity. Her tricorder and the flashlights skittered down the passageway, and Janeway covered her head as a second and third blast hit the station and debris rained down from the ceiling.

“What’s happening?” Katsumata’s distress was rising. “Is the station falling apart?”

“Phaser fire,” Janeway replied as she sat up and spied the glow of one of the flashlights beneath the debris. “Pick up the other flashlight and help me find the tricorder.”

He followed her orders and was soon crawling along the floor beside her. “Whose phasers are hitting the station?”

“I don’t know, Kazuo.” She pushed the broken material aside, using her flashlight to search through the tangle of rubble. “As of this morning the station had no weapons, but then it didn’t have shields, either. I’m guessing the battle is going on between Hyperion and whoever assassinated the ambassador. We’re probably getting hit by stray shots as they use the station for cover.” She spied the tricorder and dove for it just as the station shuddered under another jolt of weapon’s fire.

“The assassins were the Toroyans, right?”

“I thought so at first,” she answered, opening the tricorder and calling up the schematics. “Now I’m not so sure. Weren’t the Toroyans still in the room when the explosion occurred?”

“Yeah.” Katsumata’s eyes widened with surprise. “All of the major Toroyans leaders were still there.”

Janeway shook her head. “I was afraid of that.” Another blast threw them against the wall, but this time she held onto her equipment.

“Then who’s attacking Hyperion if it isn’t the Toroyans?” Katsumata was crouching against the wall, his arms crossed over his head as the station creaked and groaned around them. She reactivated the tricorder and scanned the nearby area, trying not to frown. The damage done by the phasers was making their situation significantly worse.

“Kazuo, the attack on the ambassador was just part of what’s happening here. I’m guessing that there’s a battle going on between the Hyperion and whoever staged the assassination. If might be Toroyans. Or the Union. If I’m right, those could be anyone’s phasers hitting the station, even Hyperion’s. It doesn’t really matter in the long run.”

Katasumata was horrified. “Our own ship is shooting at us?”

“Not on purpose.” She heard the rising panic in his voice and tried to reassure him. “Listen carefully, Kazuo. We can’t worry about what is going on out there. Our job is to get to engineering and drop the shields so that the three of us can be safely beamed back to the ship. Captain Schuler is dealing with the battle out there and will be there for us when the time comes.”

“You can’t know that! What if Hyperion’s shields are up, too?” His eyes were wide with fear.

“Then he’ll drop them and beam us aboard.”

“We’re going to get blown up by our own ship!” Katsumata looked around in alarm at the derelict station. “We’re going to die!”

“Not if I can help it.” She knelt beside him and grabbed his shoulders, waiting until he calmed down and gazed into her eyes. “We’ll face one thing at a time, Kazuo. Right now we’ll focus on getting to engineering. Once we’re there, we’ll face the next challenge, whatever that is. We’re in this together.”

He stared at her a moment and then nodded, swallowing hard. “Yes, Admiral.”

“Good.” She took the other flashlight, tested it, and handed it to him. “It looks like the route we were taking to engineering is no longer an option, so we’re going to backtrack and try another way.” She stood up and offered him a hand. “This is going to take time, so it’s more important than ever that you find more emergency caches.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now, let’s go.” The infrequent and glancing nature of the phaser blasts that hit the station told her that they were not the direct focus of an attack, but that wasn’t much consolation since every shot, however minor, decreased their chances of survival. The Toroyans had done a temporary fix to the power supply, and life support was growing precarious. It was noticeably colder, even with their jumpsuits, and the oxygen levels were dropping steadily.

Katsumata located a few more emergency lockers as they picked their way through the corridors, but neither had much useful left in them. Scavengers had done a thorough job of taking whatever the Toroyans had left behind in the years since the station had been moth balled.

In spite of their slow progress, Janeway tried to keep a positive attitude. They hadn’t been taken captive, the space station was still in one piece, and they were making their way to engineering, even if the trip was slow. After a two-hour struggle, they arrived at a safety hatch that sealed the engineering section off from the rest of the station, only to find it sealed and locked.

Janeway was studying her tricorder in an effort to open the hatchway when Katsumata said, “Where did you and Commander Brooks go during the meeting? Ambassador Tydkt was furious that you disappeared like that.”

Janeway stopped her efforts and looked at the young man carefully. It seemed like days since she and Marci had excused themselves from the opening session and had hastened down a passageway toward a clandestine meeting with an unknown contact who she hoped had information on Belle Colony. She shook her head at how quickly everything had turned to complete catastrophe. She said, “There are some things, Kazuo, that you’re better off not knowing.”

He swallowed and then asked the question that Janeway realized must have been haunting him for hours, “Did you have advance knowledge of the attack?”

Janeway’s eyes narrow at his implied allegation, and she stood up and glared at the young man in the eye, gratified to see him cringe at her fury. “It’s been a hell of a long day, Mr. Katsumata, and we’re both exhausted, so I’m going to ignore your accusation. I will say this: If I had known in advance about the explosion, I assure you that none of us would have beamed to the station.”

“It’s just . . . that you left right before it happened, and then . . . .”

“I know how it looks, Kazuo, but the timing of my departure was purely coincidental. I had arranged for a private briefing, that’s all.”

“All right.” Katsumata smiled weakly. “I figured it was something like that.”

“Now let me focus on getting us through this hatch.” She returned to her work, but couldn’t help but consider what she and Brooks had discovered on their brief side trip. She wondered if she had made a mistake by not contacting Schuler as soon as the meeting turned sour.

Janeway and Brooks knew him only as Pegasus. Soon after Janeway’s arrival in Union territory, a winged horse mysteriously began to appear on her view screen only to disappear without a trace before she could figure out its source. She recognized the image as a Pegasus from Greek mythology, but it wasn’t until she had Brooks look into its significance that she grasped its true significance. The U.S.S. Pegasus was a Starfleet ship that had experimented with an illegal phased cloaking device a few years earlier. The coincidence of the same cloak being researched on Belle Colony was too tantalizing for Janeway to ignore. She waited impatiently for Pegasus to contact her directly.

When the arrangements for the meeting between Ambassador Tydkt and the Toroyans were finalized, Janeway’s copy of the agreement included a private attachment for her eyes only, an attachment that had the winged horse on its cover. The diagram it included was a schematic of the deck where their meeting with the Toyoran leaders would occur with a separate chamber starred and a route indicated. Beneath the chart was a time—just after the delegation’s arrival—and a picture indicating no weapons and only two people.

Janeway and Brooks told the ambassador that they were doing a last security check of the area when left the conference room right after the formal introductions had been completed. Once out of the room, Brooks opened her tricorder and nodded down an empty hallway.

“We’re supposed to go down this way, and then take the first left. Follow that hall to the next hallway and turn right. The chamber we want is behind the first door on the left.”

“All right.” Janeway led the way. “Do we know if this Pegasus is Unionist or Toroyan?”

Brooks shrugged. “It could go either way, I guess.”

Janeway took the first left and continued down the hall, wondering when she’d last taken a risk this big, meeting an unknown individual without a phaser in hand or a transporter lock in place. After they made the next right, she paused at the first door on the left and looked at Brooks. “Do we just knock?”

“Here, let me.” Brooks stepped protectively between Janeway and the door and raised her hand to knock when she suddenly stopped. From inside the room came the sounds of a terrible struggle followed by a fierce cry of pain.

Janeway moved to the control panel beside the door and pulled off its cover. “We need to get in there before it’s too late.”

While Janeway worked on the door release mechanism, Brooks put one hand flat on each panel of the door and fought to physically pull them apart. They could hear multiple voices shouting, furniture being thrown around, glass breaking, the sound of feet as someone tried to escape. There was a blood-curdling scream, and then the room became ominously silent.

The two women looked at each other in surprise, and Brooks threw herself more enthusiastically into her task, managing to get the doors a few inches apart.

“Help me,” she groaned through gritted teeth. Janeway slipped her fingers into the crack and pulled in one direction while Brooks pulled in the other. When the door finally yielded with a metallic shriek, they peered into the shadowy room, standing side-by-side to prop the doors open.

“Hello?” Janeway said. The room was cold and dark, lit only by the weak starlight from the viewport, and the furnishings were a chaotic mess. “Is anyone there?”

There was no movement or sound as the two women studied the interior. Janeway gestured at Brooks to hold the doors as she took a step into the chamber.

“Admiral.” Brooks protested, shaking her head. “Let me.”

“It’ll be okay.” Janeway moved past a broken table just inside the door and scanned the room for a body or any other clue that would tell her who had been fighting. She quickly realized that the destruction was too great to have come from the struggle. The station had been abandoned for nearly ten years and been the repeated sanctuary of scavengers and space pirates.

She pulled out her tricorder. The floor was littered with shards of glass and broken dishes, pieces of furniture, cast off equipment, rotting food, and filthy torn clothing. It looked as though someone had lived in the room for awhile, although not recently. She pushed the debris around with her boot, looking for anything that could be useful, kneeling down when she spied an undamaged isolinear chip peeking out from a pile of broken glass.

She scanned it and realized that it was in perfect condition, the only thing in the room that wasn’t in shambles. She had just slipped it into her pocket when young Kazuo Katsumata appeared behind Commander Brooks and peered into the room.

“Admiral, the ambassador wants to start the meeting and sent me to find you.”

“I’m coming.” She stood up and smoothed her uniform, moving quickly for the door.

Not two minutes later, just as the three of them arrived at the meeting room door, all hell broke loose.

Although it was a waste of time to play these games, Janeway wondered what would have happened if she’d contacted Schuler then, as soon as her covert contact had disappeared? Would Ambassador Tydkt and the others from the delegation still be alive? Could they have beamed away from the station before the communication jamming began and the shields were raised?

She paused as a wave of guilt washed over her. She hadn’t contacted the ship because her meeting was not part of the official mission of the delegation. And if she and Brooks had remained at the ambassador’s side, they might have noticed something in time to prevent the assassination.

She suddenly felt sick at her stomach, for she realized that her personal fixation with Belle Colony had at last interfered with her performance of duty. Lives had been lost. She had been away from her post at a critical moment. She wasn’t so worried about the official repercussions of her actions, those she deserved and would accept without complaint. But the moral ones, the responsibility for the people who had trusted her with their lives, loomed large before her.

She shook her head and tried to focus on the work. She wouldn’t have to worry about punishment or her conscience if she didn’t survive this situation, but her consternation and the frigid cold made it almost impossible to hold both the tricorder and the flashlight. She glanced at Katsumata who stood shivering just behind her with his arms wrapped around himself.

“Kazuo, hold this flashlight so I can use see what I’m doing.”

He did as she ordered automatically, but the light wavered as he shook with cold. “The phasers have stopped,” he mentioned in a whisper. “What does that mean?”

She frowned, imagining a half dozen different scenarios before choosing one that would be the least frightening to her young companion. “Hyperion’s best defense is her superior speed. The best tactic would be to outrun her attackers and pick them off one-by-one in the process.”

Katsumata lowered the light in shock. “You mean the ship’s gone?”

“They’ll be back.” She waited a moment before returning to the task at hand. “Now, I need the light on the control panel.”

He didn’t move a muscle. “But what if they think everyone was killed in the explosion? Wouldn’t they just head for Federation space?”

Janeway had tried hard not to think of that possibility and wasn’t happy with the Katsumata for bringing it up. “Captain Schuler has both a Federation ambassador and a Starfleet admiral on an away mission. He would never leave us behind unless he did a full scan for survivors, even if he has to come back later. In the meantime, we need to stop the jamming device so we can contact him and make sure he knows we’re alive, and then we need to drop the shields so he can beam us back to the ship.”

That comment did the trick. Katsumata focused the light on the panel with renewed enthusiasm. “The quiet could mean that the battle is over and the ship is on its way back.”

“That’s a definite possibility, Kazuo.” Janeway smiled as the solution to opening the hatch suddenly appeared on the tricorder’s screen. “Ah! I think we’re in, at last.”

Later, it would seem to Janeway that her activation of the door mechanism in some way triggered the deafening explosion that rocked the station, for just as her finger touched the pad, she and Katsumata were falling backward down the hallway that was abruptly vertical instead of horizontal. They were blinded and deafened by the blast that seemed to roll toward them as they fell, and they landed with terrific force against the wall of the intersecting hallway where they surrendered to blessed oblivion.