“I saw the logs like everyone else. I know what it looks like. But I’m telling you, they weren’t destroyed. I’m not imagining this or making it up.”
“Very well. I, too, have seen the logs, and while I am no expert, I found nothing to suggest that anyone aboard the Galen could have survived that encounter.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Upon what do you base your belief that my eyes have deceived me?”
Gwyn crossed her arms over her chest in understandable protectiveness. “It’s just a feeling.”
Cambridge nodded. “What kind of feeling?”
Gwyn seemed confused by the question.
“Let me put it another way. What do you see in those logs that the rest of us are missing?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“But you feel certain that the Galen’s crew is still alive?”
Gwyn’s next words were chosen incredibly carefully. “I feel certain that one person aboard that ship is still alive and if they are, the others could be as well.”
“Who?” Cambridge asked.
Gwyn hesitated to respond.
“Am I correct in assuming that if this fleet were yours to command, you would order it immediately to begin a search for the Galen?” he asked kindly.
Gwyn nodded.
“Do you have any sense of how close they might be or where we might find them?”
“No.”
“And do you understand that in that process, every other member of this fleet would be endangering themselves on your orders?”
“We do that every day,” Gwyn said a little too defensively.
“That’s true, but you would be asking us to engage in activity that might lead us into the path of that alien vessel again. Do you believe another such encounter would end well for us?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Gwyn said. “They’re helpless. They need us. We have to find them.”
“Why won’t you tell me who this one person you feel certain survived is?” Cambridge asked.
Softly, Gwyn replied, “You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
Gwyn took a few short, quick breaths and finally answered, “Harry Kim and Nancy Conlon’s daughter.”
Cambridge took a moment to collect himself before saying, “I see.”
He wasn’t disappointed. On the contrary, he had suspected since Gwyn first spoke up in the briefing room that this was the case. Now he needed to find out if there was any way this impossible assertion could also be true.
Shortly after Cambridge and Gwyn departed the briefing room, the meeting ended with the admiral’s orders to each officer present that they advise her immediately should any new information regarding the attack become available. Captain Chakotay knew that it was her intention to return to the Vesta and that for some undisclosed reason, she wasn’t looking forward to that. Despite his recommendation that she invite Farkas and O’Donnell to the briefing, Janeway had pointedly chosen to limit the initial group to Voyager personnel. Chakotay didn’t know why. He only knew that it was unusual. Speculating beyond that was not something for which he currently had the presence of mind.
He understood on some level that he wasn’t thinking or perceiving reality around him with the clarity he considered “normal.” As he responded automatically to the questions posed by his fellow officers, he could hear how argumentative and defensive he sounded, but he couldn’t seem to care. He knew that he probably should; it was simply not possible.
He could not stop seeing the Galen being destroyed in his mind. Even as he tried to focus on the present, his conscious thoughts returned stubbornly to the moment, or rather the latest moment that had brought painful change to his life. Reason was lost to the maelstrom that accompanied the emotional blow, an internal explosion happening over and over again.
He had experienced shock before. He had survived psychological agony so acute as to render him nearly nonfunctional. He remembered those experiences, even as the distance between them and this moment had mercifully lessened their impact. He understood the inchoate rage living just beneath the surface of the shock and its intense desire to be given free rein to spend itself by lashing out at everyone within arm’s length. He also knew in some distant, almost disconnected part of himself that this feeling would pass, others more painful would follow, and that eventually he would have to begin the task of reintegration, of creating himself anew with spaces left forever empty within him where those he had loved and just lost had once lived.
But he was clearly not yet ready to do that work, nor could he imagine himself ever being quite ready.
The last of his officers had filed out but Commander Tom Paris remained seated at the briefing room table, slouched in his seat, staring forward, his gaze fixed on something a thousand light-years distant.
Chakotay reached for words that might bring Paris from this stupor, then thought better of it. Tom was undoubtedly in the same place he was. Words could wait.
As he willed his feet to step toward the door, Paris’s voice struck him like a shot.
“You can’t do this again, Captain.”
Chakotay could count on one hand the number of times Paris had addressed him by his rank rather than his name in private conversation over the last year. The clearly intentional emphasis hit the nerve Paris had been aiming toward and stopped Chakotay in his tracks. He turned on his first officer ready to justify his next words with every weapon that rank afforded him, but when Paris lifted his face to Chakotay’s, something—perhaps the sheer tonnage of loss between them—made him think twice.
Paris clearly saw this as progress, and an opening to continue. Rising to his feet, he said, “There’s something you should know.”
“Something about how badly Kathryn’s death once broke me and how there is no time right now for a repeat performance?” Chakotay asked. The words were harsh but he managed to modulate his tone toward the compassionate end of the spectrum. Both stood on the precipice of saying a thousand things they would later wish to take back, and Chakotay had no desire to be the first to step over
