Disclaimer: Star Trek: Voyager and all things Starfleet belong to Paramount. No infringement intended.

Summary: Another take on the future following Endgame.

Safe Harbor

by Mizvoy

Chapter 2: Loyalty

Chakotay had always been a sucker for powerful, self-sufficient women. His first lover had been five years his senior, a college girl home for winter break during his freshman year of high school. They’d carried on an intermittent affair until he left for Starfleet Academy at the young age of sixteen. There, he’d met Sveta, the graduate student who mentored him and eventually lured him into the Maquis twenty years later.

His first posting on the Blade Arrow had resulted in an involvement with the female first officer, but it had ended in disaster and taught him an important lesson about the danger of shipboard romances. His years teaching at Starfleet Academy had brought an involvement with Alynna Necheyev, Dean of Faculty and eventual full admiral and chief of operations. In the Maquis there had been Seska, and then, in the Delta Quadrant, Riley Frasier, and Kellen, the woman he couldn’t remember except for his written account of their affair, and, eventually, Seven of Nine. All powerful, independent women.

Seven had blossomed in the small community on Dorvan V, fulfilling all the potential Kathryn had seen in her from the beginning. To him, she was Kathryn’s daughter, a protégé who unconsciously, perhaps, imitated her mentor. He convinced himself that he loved her and convinced her to marry him a year after their arrival. As beautiful as Seven was, as voluptuous and sweet, it was her independence and strength that spoke to him. He was happy. He was sure he was happy.

But, in a recent conference with a village elder, his confidence had been shaken. The elder studied his face calmly and said, “You have given your heart, Chakotay, but it has not been accepted.” He was confused, at first, about her meaning. He was married, after all, and had been for over two years. What could she mean when she said his heart had not been accepted? That night, during his meditation, he had asked his animal guide what the elder had meant, but the silver wolf simply stared at him, and she almost seemed to smile as she panted in the desert heat. Finally, she said, “Your heart knows the answer,” and padded away into the darkness.

A few weeks later, he decided to take a few days to attend a leadership conference on Deep Space 9. The keynote speaker was supposed to be Admiral Richard Laramie, a rising star in the Judge Advocate General’s office and Kathryn’s legal counsel during the hearing and court martial following Voyager’s return. Laramie was responsible, according to her, for her exoneration and eventual promotion to admiral. As much as he hated to admit it, Chakotay was jealous of this new man who seemed to be taking his place as her best friend. He hoped to meet him and find out how Kathryn was really getting along.

He hadn’t expected her to be with him.

He slipped into the back of the lecture hall after the lights had been lowered. Sitting on the dais at the front were the guests of honor, including Admiral Laramie, and beside him, Admiral Kathryn Janeway. He could hear the people around him whispering about her, speculating about her presence. “Of course she loves him,” one woman murmured. “He saved her career. He knows her secrets.” The man behind him said, “She’s so pretty. She’s an ornament for him, a trophy.” And then, “She’s so petite. How could she intimidate anybody?”

He laughed in spite of himself. Anyone who thought of Kathryn as petite simply hadn’t met her in person, hadn’t experienced her powerful presence and self-confidence. He found himself staring at her. She had gained a little weight in all the right places, probably by working out on a regular basis at last. He could see the glow of a little grey in her hair, a hint of the glorious white hair the first Admiral Janeway had worn. She wore no jewelry, no rings, no earrings, in compliance with the strictest interpretation of Starfleet protocol, but she exuded power and class and poise. Even from here, from the back of the huge room, he could feel the effect of her charisma, her charm, her incredible intelligence, qualities that had saved them, time and again, in the Delta Quadrant.

He didn’t hear a word Laramie said, but he watched Kathryn listen, watched her face and her hands respond to his words. He sensed the connection between them and felt a stab of physical pain in his gut. Why shouldn’t she find someone? Why shouldn’t she have someone to turn to? How could he be angry if she turned to someone else when he was married and light years away? But the sight of her, of them together, was too much to bear. He stood to leave when he heard her name announced.

Laramie had turned and extended his hand, “Please welcome Admiral Kathryn Janeway.”

He sank into his seat, the only one seated as the crowd erupted into a standing ovation, and he closed his eyes, steeling himself as she began to speak. At first, he didn’t listen to her words, but drank in the unmistakable, distinctive warmth of her voice. Finally, he opened his eyes and listened to the last words she spoke.

“The most important thing I learned about leadership in the Delta Quadrant was taught me by my crew,” she said. “I learned to look at people not as they are or have been, but as they could be. I learned that if I gained their trust and faith, that if I accepted them with all their failings and faults, they would not let me down and they would forgive me for my own shortcomings.

“Some people claim that I’m a hero because I brought a ship 70,000 light years in just seven years, because my ship brought back with it a wealth of information about a previously unexplored region of space. Well. I’m not a hero. I was blessed to be the leader of the best group of people in the universe. A mottled crew, some people think, but no. The blend of Starfleet and Maquis, the touch of Talaxian, Ocampan, even a former Borg drone, made it possible to create a miracle in an impossible situation. I miss them, and I always will.

“As their captain, I only wanted to be what my crew needed me to be. I wanted to do what my crew needed me to do. I wanted to find and give my crew whatever they required for their survival and happiness. I served them. I put them first. I made their needs, their goals paramount. Good leaders do that. They love their crews and serve them, not the other way around.

“You’re the leaders in this sector, servants to your people. And with that leadership comes many privileges. ‘Rank has its privileges’ they say, but the privileges that come with your positions require great sacrifices from you, sacrifices of time, of personal happiness, of personal fulfillment, of life itself, if necessary. Don’t be afraid to make the necessary sacrifices. What really matters is that you did the right thing, no matter the cost, no matter the pain. You can live with pain, but you cannot live without faith. You can afford to pay the price of your own happiness if the result is success and happiness for those you serve, those you love. And you must love the people you serve. There is no other way to meet the challenge of leadership.”

She stopped talking, and Chakotay buried his face in his hands as she took questions from the crowd. They were, for the most part, the usual questions he faced himself—what was the moment of greatest terror (when the Kazon took possession of the ship), what was the moment of greatest triumph (when Voyager burst into the Alpha Quadrant), what was the strangest thing that happened (when the ship was bent and stretched by an space/time anomaly). He stayed to the end and was shocked by the final question.

“You say you must serve and love your crew,” the young woman said. “What do you mean by ‘love your crew’?”

Kathryn smiled broadly. “Well, I don’t mean the physical act of love, if that’s your implication. In fact, a leader must be very careful in that regard. I believe that a Starfleet captain cannot look to his or her crew for physical love.” A murmur ran through the crowd. “Yes, that is one of the sacrifices I made,” she said wistfully.

“But that means that the love is pure, altruistic, deep, and without a personal agenda. It’s the kind of love that cannot be destroyed, that lives on and on. I love Voyager’s crew like my family. Unconditionally. Forever. I’ve promised myself to serve them for the rest of my life, to love them like a parent, like a benevolent despot, until I meet my final days. Would I give my life for them? In a minute. But, that’s only fair. I’ve asked them to risk their lives in trusting me, in following my orders, no matter how demented those orders might have seemed at the time. It’s a matter of faith, of trust. I won’t let them down.”

Following a long ovation, she left the podium and was nearly back to her seat when someone shouted over the applause, “You love the Maquis criminals?” The room fell into complete silence.

Chakotay watched what he called “the captain’s mask” slide smoothly into place on Kathryn’s face. She peered into the crowd, her blue eyes dark and flashing.

“Who said that?” she demanded. No one responded. It took courage to face an angry Kathryn Janeway; Chakotay could hardly blame the heckler for hiding. She turned and walked slowly back to the podium, gripping it tightly as she worked to calm her fury, to regain control of her raging emotions. Chakotay found that he held his breath. He wanted to hear what she was about to say; he needed to hear it. She looked up into the crowd, and the power of her presence seemed to drain the room of oxygen.

“Please understand. I don’t like cowards,” she said. “If you ask a question, you should own up to it.” She stared at the crowd, looking from face to face, challenging them. “Now, I ask again. Who asked that question?”

A full minute passed before a young man stood up and faced her. “I asked it,” he admitted, his voice a whisper. He was young, less than twenty, Chakotay guessed, and this moment would make or break him, would affect every moment of his future. He wanted to warn Kathryn of that, to tell her not to damage him, not to disgrace him. He was tempted to dash to the front of the room to advise her, but there wasn’t time.

“Thank you for being honest,” she said, gesturing to the young man. She visibly relaxed. “Please come up here.”

The man made his way to the end of the row. He walked hesitantly down the aisle and up the stairs, stopping near the podium. Kathryn smiled at him and pointed to her side. “Right here, please.” He towered over her, yet she wasn’t dwarfed by him. “I don’t bite,” she teased.

She put her arm around the man’s waist, tactile as ever, and faced the crowd. “It isn’t easy to ask the hard questions, but somebody has to do it. Somebody has to have the courage to ask the questions we all want answered.” She looked up at the man. “What’s your name?”

“Brandt Williams. From Chalista V.”

“Don’t stop asking the hard questions, Mr. Williams. Don’t loose the courage.” He nodded at her and swallowed visibly. “Now, let me answer your question about the Maquis.

“Leaders will always have dissidents in their midst as well as the true believers. It’s easy to serve and love the true believers. They trust you implicitly, because they share your values and your ethics. In an ideal world, all your followers would be true believers. But the ideal world, as you know, doesn’t exist, and so we must deal with reality.” She was talking directly to the man, looking up at him with the earnest sincerity that Chakotay had seen so often in her face. She would convert this man, he realized, just as she’d converted him, the Maquis, the Equinox Five, and dozens of alien Delta Quadrant races. By the time she finished with him, Mr. Williams would follow her through the gates of hell. She was a builder of faith, not a destroyer, and he felt his heart swell with pride and admiration for his former captain.

“The Maquis were, at first, my dissidents. They had rejected Starfleet protocol and Federation ethics because they had values and beliefs that those organizations could not, or would not, condone. You call them criminals because you look at them from the Federation’s perspective. But from their perspective, they could just as easily call the Federation’s policies criminal because we didn’t act to end the injustice of the Cardassian treaty, to protect innocent victims from Cardassian brutality. That’s an important lesson to learn—to look at the situation from the both sides. When I did that, I could understand their reluctance to submit to a Starfleet captain’s control.

“I had no right to expect them to follow me, not did I have any obligation to serve them, and I certainly couldn’t be expected to love them.” She looked at the man until he shook his head in agreement. “Luckily, we had a mutual problem. I had a ship, but I didn’t have enough crew to take care of it properly. The Maquis had a crew, but no ship to get them home. And so, we focused on that common problem. The Maquis could have told me to go to hell and retired to the relative comfort of the brig. I would have been honor bound to take care of them to the best of my ability, wouldn’t I? They could have been a drain, a hardship to Voyager, perhaps making it impossible for the ship to return home as we did.

“Except for two important things. They were people with noble principles, and they had, in Captain Chakotay, the perfect blend of Starfleet and Maquis sensibilities.” Suddenly self-conscious, Chakotay slid lower in his seat and putting his hand over his tattoo, wondering what she was going to say about him, worried that he’d be recognized.

“I was lucky that it was this particular captain I had been sent to capture. Chakotay always saw the elemental, the basics, of any problem and went to it intuitively. He knew that Starfleet and Maquis both adhered to beliefs and principles that served their idea of what was right and good. We simply had to find principles we could both believe in, and we had to have a mutual goal.

“Ultimately, the Maquis had to learn to trust me and accept me as their commander, a Starfleet captain, perhaps the embodiment of all that had made them join the Maquis in the first place. With Chakotay’s help at every step of the way, with his example of loyalty and faith, we forged a unified crew with loyalties to us, to the principles we established, to our goal of getting home. They became so much a part of Voyager that I forgot, at times, that they weren’t all Starfleet to start with. In my mind, they are Starfleet today.”

The room was silent, expectant. “Because of their loyalty and service, I must give the Maquis the same dedication I give the rest of the crew, Mr. Williams. Did I serve them? At all times and to the best of my ability. Did I love them? I did love them, Mr. Williams. I do love them and I always will.”

The crowd stood up and cheered, pushing their way out of their seats, into the aisles, and toward the stage. Mr. Williams solemnly shook Kathryn’s hand as Admiral Laramie made his way to her side, encircling her waist with his arm and leaning down to whisper something in her ear that brought a wide grin to her face. Chakotay could take no more. Tears in his eyes, he made his way out of the building into the cool evening breeze.

For a while he just walked aimlessly, too numb to think about his roiling emotions. The captain had loved her crew. She’d loved them so much that she’d come back twenty-six years later to save them. She’d known it was a one-way trip, that she would lose her past to give them a better future, but had she known it would be suicide? When the admiral had met Kathryn’s relentless determination to destroy the hub, she’d given her life for them. She’d gone to the Borg queen willingly, and with Kathryn’s blessing, because she loved them. He found himself in tears for the Admiral Janeway who had died, feeling that somehow he had let her down, that he should’ve intervened. He realized, too late, that as different as she had been, she was still Kathryn, still his friend.

But, eventually, he had to face the truth. He was a sucker for strong, independent women, and he’d married the one that was perhaps the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. But all of them paled when compared to Kathryn Janeway. She was the one woman he’d always use as his ideal, and she was lost to him forever. He’d offered her his heart, but she hadn’t taken it.

Morose, he found his way back to his room, checked out, and started the long journey back to Dorvan.