“You play?”
“I was known, in my younger days, to frequent a number of establishments featuring games of chance.”
“Were you any good?”
Paris laughed. “I was terrible. But that’s the point. The house always wins. That’s the way those games are designed.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Not really. I mean, I still like a good game of pool now and again, but I wouldn’t trade the life I have now for anything.”
“Because you have children?”
“They’re definitely part of it. Watching a human grow and develop and learn to do everything is kind of amazing. I missed a lot of the early days with Miral. I’m glad I get to see Michael’s.”
“It doesn’t worry you, though?”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Lieutenant,” Paris said. He tended to be a fairly open soul, especially with fellow crew members, but he couldn’t recall Patel ever expressing the slightest interest in his personal life in the past. She kept to herself and he wasn’t quite sure why she would suddenly be curious. Of course, she had recently nearly died and that might have ignited a desire on her part to expand her horizons a little. Or maybe eight hours into this mission, small talk was just out of the question.
“I beg your pardon, Commander,” Patel said quickly. “It was not my intention to pry.”
“No, it’s not a problem.”
“I do owe you an apology, don’t I? I’m doing a lot of that lately,” she added.
Paris paused. He wanted to keep his partner on this mission focused and in good spirits. They were trudging across an asteroid wearing the best environmental protection Starfleet had devised, but that didn’t mean that one wrong move couldn’t end in disaster. But conversations like this were better suited to the mess hall, or the holodeck, where tone and physical cues were easier to read. Shutting her down completely, however, was going to make the rest of the mission incredibly awkward. He proceeded with caution.
“I can’t think of anything you’ve done that would require forgiveness from me, Devi,” he said sincerely. “Making conversation isn’t a crime.”
“I was referring to the rescue mission you and Commander Torres undertook to save my team and the fact that I lied to you both during that mission. I am sorry. It placed both of you in danger. You have a family, and if something I did meant that your children no longer had parents, that would have been unforgivable.”
Paris took a minute to think before responding. “I’m not going to lie to you. That was tough. And B’Elanna and I had a long talk afterward about the wisdom of joint away missions in the future. Full disclosure, I’m against them. She’s not, depending on the circumstances. But the thing is, what you did is the only reason we have a hope in hell of finding the Galen now. So, while I’m not going to suggest that you make a habit of keeping decisions like that to yourself going forward, I acknowledge that I played a part in that decision. You asked us to keep the line open to transmit your data and I was against it. If I had listened better or given your opinion greater weight, it might have gone differently.”
“It’s kind of you to say so, sir,” Patel said. “Thank you.”
“I don’t really think having Miral and Michael with us for this mission makes it more difficult,” Paris continued, now that he better understood Patel’s question. “I don’t think of it as optional. My mom was content to raise my sisters and me while my father served in Starfleet. That was their choice. It is not one I would ever make. Missing all of that time with my father was difficult. I won’t do to them what he did to me.
“But are there moments, when we were staring down a few dozen ships outside the Confederacy’s gateway, or when that Voth ship attacked, that I recognize the danger to them and wish like hell they were somewhere safer? Yes. Definitely. At which point B’Elanna usually reminds me that the alternative would be worse. Put it this way: As it stands right now, the rewards outweigh the risks. If that ever changes, our choice might have to change as well.”
“I remember when I realized I was going to die in that cavern. All I knew was that terrible as that choice was, there was no better alternative. It’s a line everyone has to find inside themselves and sometimes that only happens in the moment. You don’t know how much you are willing to risk until the second you have to make that call,” Patel said.
“Yeah. Personally, I could go the rest of my life without facing one of those seconds again.”
“We’ve had more than our fair share this year, haven’t we?” she asked.
“I blame the Delta Quadrant,” Paris said lightly. “There just seems to be no end to the sheer tonnage of strange, messed-up—”
A loud beep from Paris’s tricorder cut him off. He pulled it from his suit and checked the display as a similar alarm sounded from Patel’s.
“Hydrogen?” they both said simultaneously.
Patel put some distance between herself and Paris as she began to scan what appeared to be a very shallow crater just a few meters wide and mere centimeters deep.
“How does hydrogen get here?” Paris asked.
Patel was tapping her tricorder, obviously altering its scanning configuration. After a few moments, she went to her knees, her hand playing over the fine dust that formed the asteroid’s surface. “There was water here, fairly recently,” she said.
“Where did it come from?” Paris asked.
“We know that at least some of these asteroids contain the Edrehmaia base,” Patel said. “Until now, I have assumed that was a random occurrence, the result of debris from the formation of the binary system leaving deposits out here that were originally part of another body.”
“Have you changed your mind about that?”
“We will need to do deep scans of several of
