Crash Restraints

A/N – I wanted to explore how far the Doctor might go to defend his crew, how Kes might have grown if more weight had fallen on her shoulders, and how those changes might have changed their path together.

Set in the early aftermath of the Borg's attempt to assimilate Voyager from within, breaking their alliance against 8472, in an AU where that battle went very differently.

Also references "Darkling" (season 3) shortly prior, when the Doctor's last attempt to improve his code inadvertently created a dark alter-self who kidnapped Kes and nearly killed them both.

Last, all the thanks to femellas for the encouraging but profoundly helpful beta-ing. Thank you for making this more the story I wanted to tell.

. . . . .

If the Doctor had been human, after his first startup in a shuttlecraft, he would have sent himself to counseling.

Even for him, it was unsettling. The air was thick with smoke; his head was bumping on the low ceiling, and it shuddered against him.

It took him a moment to process the surroundings. When he'd gone offline, the senior staff had been laying countermeasures for that liaison drone's inevitable shot at assimilating the ship. He'd expected to wake to a sickbay half-full of minor casualties. Not a shuttle limping down through a roaring atmosphere.

Turning in the haze, he looked for the helm. "Please state the nature of…" There it was. He, then, was standing back in cargo, and up at the pilot's console - "Kes? Is that you?"

She had her back to him and didn't hear over the atmosphere. But it was her. Piloting, and coughing over the controls as well, but not enough to have called him up for that during a landing. But there was no one else in sight.

He was alone then, for reasons unknown but clearly disastrous, with the last person alive he'd wanted to face for weeks.

That untimely thought surprised him, till he realized his program was still in startup. A few emotional subroutines had apparently jumped the line and snuck past the prioritization filter. Odd. He muted them for a picosecond, till he came fully online and could direct his attention.

He brought it back to the elusive medical emergency at hand.

"Where?" he bellowed as he finished loading, crouching for a better look through the haze at the floor, the only remaining space he hadn't surveyed.

Kes was saving her breath for breathing, and still hadn't looked back, but just as she spared a hand from the controls to gesture halfway between them, he saw it too. Someone, male, was sprawled out on the floor. He knelt beside him, just as Kes dipped the craft's nose hard, to avoid a cluster of blazing meteorites that sleeted down in front of them.

The Doctor barely caught himself, bracing on all fours over the body. But from there he could see more clearly. An ensign, by the pips. He crouched closer. Blain, by what remained of his face.

But he was well beyond the help of medicine. Most of his skin was charred into his uniform; the smoke was coming mostly from that, the rest from an exploded wall panel, still sparking above his body.

The Doctor checked his remaining carotid anyway. No pulse. He palpated the flesh of the shoulder, abdomen, thigh; it sloughed and fragmented under his fingers.

So. To all appearances, anticipating the Borg's treachery hadn't been enough to stop it, and now he'd lost his first patient to them.

And those weren't meteorites.

But none of that was certain, and there was no telling what else had changed, and Kes was busy trying to land them on a strange planet with half a working nacelle on the leading edge of Voyager's explosion. So the Doctor ransacked the cargo area anyway, in case the apparently many events of the past hours had included a massive upgrade to shuttle medical equipment.

Instead, behind crates of rations, he found a pair of standard disaster response medkits. He tore in and rummaged through. No. Nothing there would reverse massive capillary leakage, refill the charred-off major vessels, and bring Blain back.

At least the burns were that deep. It would have been quick and, paradoxically, painless.

"He's dead," he bellowed at last, dimly grateful that emotion was still muted.

(The Captain would almost certainly disapprove of that new trick, and he needed to stop using it. But for a program matrix built for healing, rebuilding itself from a malfunction that had made him a murderous kidnapper, while creating on her orders a biomolecular weapon against an entire species, it had been that or risk a crash and fail her entirely.)

Kes looked back, stricken but unsurprised, face tight under a sheen of sweat, a few of her curls plastered to her temples. She was already locked into her crash restraint. Behind her, through the viewport, weapons fire was now sleeting past. "Can you secure your own setup?"

He didn't understand, but this was no time to distract a pilot further. He looked round again, waving smoke away.

There it was, in the back: himself, exposed. Not the thin temporary version that could fit in the portable emitter, but all of him, packaged for a long exile. Five neural gelpacks, cradled like a blue jewel in a nest of relays and medical tubing, connected to a data processor and a portable power supply. It was his equivalent of glancing in a mirror and seeing his innards. No wonder his startup had been choppy. As if any further evidence of how badly wrong things had gone were needed.

He tied it down with the crash restraints Blain would have worn.

He finished just in time, as they veered sickeningly port and down, below a line of fire erupting to the fore. Blain's body slammed the wall, cracking something. The doctor slammed it close behind him, along with several storage containers.

He peeled himself off. It seemed the whole cargo area was a hazard zone of unsecured equipment, piled there in better times for later sorting. It wouldn't take a lethal-velocity landing to kill Kes too, if things were still flying loose when they crashed.

So after all the dreams of freedom that had come with getting the portable emitter, that was how he left the ship for the last time. Falling through the sky, the Borg above them and Voyager's shrapnel blazing all around, shoving and bracing the cargo to protect the person he had most entirely, recently, failed to protect. They rattled like dice in a cup, and the sea yawned up to take them.

. . . . . . . .

It almost worked. When the sea slammed the shuttlecraft, swallowed them and spit them out again, a loose canister only broke her calf. The vessel's frantic yawing let it roll round her chair, crush her leg against the bulkhead, then roll ponderously back the way it had come.

Kes howled, then quickly stifled it, as if she might be heard. The sudden silence outside made that feel somehow plausible. But there was no visible pursuit; the weapons fire had stopped when they dropped below the clouds. Only a few silent flares behind the clouds, as the largest chunks of Voyager's hull caught fire in the atmosphere.

The floor was already rocking faintly, with the gentle indifference of the sea.

So he cracked open the cargo door to vent the smoke, helped her out of the crash restraint to the floor, and used the medkit scalpel to slice the tights off her injured leg. It wasn't subtle; vision was enough to make a diagnosis.

At least he still knew how. His medical databanks seemed intact.

"It's a closed compression fracture of the lateral hemitibia. But I assume we can't take the risk of using beam-generating equipment."

The disaster kits had been stripped of osteoregenerators anyway in a supply trade months before, over his objections. But a dermal regenerator would at least have helped with the pain, if they'd dared. Other than his emitter, though, the Borg would have experience detecting the use of any such tools.

She shook her head in agreement, panting with pain by then, with the start of a shocky pallor.

Time for field medicine, then. Starting with an analgesic hypospray, which wasn't going to suffice when he set the bone the old-fashioned way.

"Can I proceed by hand?"

She met his eyes. After the business with his alter-self, after accepting his shuddering apology, she'd never told him more than the bare facts of her hour as its captive. But he knew that in taking her, it too had claimed to be doing something painful for her own good.

But what she said was, "I may pass out. We have to navigate to shore, and I don't think the nacelle will start again once it's out."

He nodded. "I'll revive you immediately." The sense of being hunted was nearly palpable; absurdly, they were both nearly whispering.

She turned her head away and gripped the struts of the pilot's seat. "Go ahead. You may have to immobilize me. If your power supply allows."

He didn't think, yet, to ask why it might not. He had unmuted emotion - that trick had no place in patient care, and he really did need to give it up entirely - and the grief, fear, and pain on her face were more than his program could manage. He looked away to focus on the bone.

She did jerk, and yelled once, as it set. But she stayed conscious and, after that, just bit the inside of her cheeks till the analgesic reached full effect. By the time he confirmed circulation, wrapped and braced it, her greenish look had begun to fade. She stood, bracing on him, to get to the seat and see the readouts.

"Passive sensors are offline. We must have hit some shrapnel. We'll have to let the others come to us."

He surveyed the water for any sign of life besides themselves. Nothing. "They're in escape pods?" She nodded. "Then they would have aimed for land."

Or, if pursued, for coastal waters, where they could sink the pods and then swim to shore. This deep-water landing might have been her only choice with a half nacelle, but it was no way to stay with the herd.

And the pods can't evade debris or weapons fire like the shuttlecraft can, he didn't add.

Kes set the course for shore at a creeping pace, keeping the nacelles underwater to hide their heat signature. Only then did she relax a bit, sliding back onto the floor but keeping watch through the viewport, while he went to roll Blain on his back.

And then he could put it off no longer.

"The size of those pieces. We self-destructed?"

She didn't look at him; she seemed, like the injured sometimes did, to be going somewhere inside herself. "The Captain did it. To keep the biomolecular warhead from them."

The doctor pulled Blain's legs straight, closed his eyes, and draped the medkit's thermal blanket over his body. He hadn't known him well, by Voyager standards; he'd been a healthy man in a safe assignment. They'd had not one interest in common, and somehow that in itself felt like a failure now.

"Under the circumstances, that's good news. Then was all the crew able to evacuate?"

She nodded. He took the copilot seat, to take over keeping watch, so she let her eyes close briefly against the pain. "Those that survived that long, I think. There were two pods remaining when I left, for the senior officers. But I lost the others two kilometers up, trying to dodge. I don't know if…how many went down."

The names scrolled past in his working memory. Blain first, then the others. Some of his crew roll would need to be stricken. He registered the task, but for some reason, they still wouldn't stop scrolling.

As they glided, Kes told him of the grinding twelve-hour battles that had played out above. Inside the ship, between the assimilation nanites in Voyager's bloodstream and the crew's desperate firewalls and booby traps. And outside it, between Voyager and the pursuing cubes, which would have made quick work of her if not half-crippled already from battle with species 8472.

In the end, resistance was only partly futile. The nanites had taken one system after another, isolating the crew one at a time for assimilation, but the bridge officers had defended navigation and propulsion long enough to choose where Voyager would die. This M-class planet deep in the Northwest Passage, where the Borg didn't go.

Except one cube, less damaged or more stubborn than the others, limping after them to haunt the sky above. When the clouds cleared, he would see it.

By the time she finished, they were in sight of shore. While Kes adjusted course, toward a dark mass of cliffs where a shuttlecraft might hide, he wondered aloud why the cube had bothered firing on escape pods. It seemed unBorglike.

Somehow, though, the question took longer to even formulate than he expected. The names wouldn't stop rolling, and he found himself physically shaking his virtual head to clear it.

She had opened her eyes and was studying him. Some of the blue of her irises was lost to the spectral shift of this sun's pale light; here, they looked almost gray. Instead of answering, she said, "How do you feel? Are you intact?"

Funny timing, to ask that after consenting to a painful emergency procedure. But still a fair question, and not only because of the recent past. Running him on the current setup was like playing Guilio Cesare by banging rocks together.

He ran a level-one self-diagnostic.

"Apart from the loss of speed, nothing seems to be flagged now. There was a minor glitch, but it cleared." The scrolling crew roster hadn't even been flagged; it must be just an overwhelmed emotional subroutine. Surely it, too, would stop at any moment.

"The Captain warned us. That anything projecting power will burn through it quickly here. Not to count on power sources for survival. She didn't say why. By then, she knew they were listening."

He digested that bit of bad news. "How many hours do you think I have?"

Kes scooted herself over to the bulk of the setup. "I tried to pack for several hundred. We'll know soon. But look; even now, right beside the portable power supply, the emitter's not charging. You can travel with it for now, but when its battery dies, you'll be stuck close by, running it directly off the power supply. While that lasts."

He looked it over more closely. "There's no interface for doing code repair. What if…"

He trailed off. She, of all people, needed no reminders.

And her face was in fact suitably grim, but for a different reason. "I didn't want the wrong hands on it. You have a direct internal interface. But you'll have to do any code repairs with the emitter turned off. The processor can't handle both at once."

His imaging routines provided a brief, unwanted vision of the Borg reprogramming his image here to lure survivors out of hiding. She was right; his own hands on his code were better than theirs. Probably. What surprised him was that she thought the same.

He turned back to the matter at hand. "I should congratulate you," he tried, knowing that was wrong, that nothing he said now would make anything right, "on extracting me at all. It's never occurred to me to even identify the gelpacks responsible for my program. You may have saved numerous lives among the survivors."

It was only after finishing that – he must be running slow indeed – that he realized how unlikely he was to save additional lives at all. His advantage was in Sickbay; here, with only level-3 medical kits, Kes could do almost anything he could. And getting him to the shuttlecraft where his setup could fit, instead of the quick little lifepods, had been a potentially deadly delay.

"Wait. Kes," he said slowly, "why me?"

Perhaps, if one considered the crew would likely live out their lives here, and her natural lifespan wouldn't cover most of that…but the look on her face said something different.

She was about to answer, and then the shuttlecraft computer spoke, for what turned out to be the final time. It felt oddly like Voyager herself, the last piece of her body speaking her last words. "Arriving at destination."

. . . . . . . .

They glided up to the rocky shore at dusk and trailed along it slowly, searching the sandstone formations for a place to hide the shuttle. Cloud cover hid the pale sunset and, hopefully, gave them some cover as well. Out of caution, they traveled twelve kilometers from the last glimpse of clear sky before settling on a sandy, half-roofed crescent cove. Massive rock pillars further out, half-hidden in their own long shadows now, partly sheltered them from open sea.

He cleared a path in the flotsam on the beach, and she coaxed the nacelle one last time to slide the craft up above the tide line, into the partial shelter of the cliff.

He spent a few minutes, and a bit of emitter battery, on some urgent trial and error. The emitter could draw from the portable power supply up to two meters away. Any farther, and it began draining its own battery, which would last perhaps three hours. If he wanted to be sensible, he was confined to the shuttlecraft, except for emergencies.

But they had to get a wider view inland to find the others, and Kes couldn't climb. So he used ten more minutes of emitter battery to get up the cliffs. From there, though, the craggy forest canopy inland was unbroken, up to a ridge of peaks further in that blocked his view. No smoke and no light. And no comms or other sensors could safely be used.

No hope of reuniting with or treating the others tonight, then. He retreated.

If not for her injury, they would have been facing a survival-and-evasion decision, which Kes wasn't trained in and he wasn't designed for. If she left the shuttle, risking the wilds, her life signs alone would be harder for the Borg to track. And without an engineer, the craft would never run again anyway. But it was still shelter and some protection from natural hazards, and his "portable" power supply weighed hundreds of kilograms.

But as it was, it didn't matter. At any distance she could cover with the brace on a broken bone, once they found the shuttle, the Borg would find her regardless. Might as well stay.

So he used the sand to cover the shuttle roof, and then, to bury Blain. He wrote his name and serial number with a finger below the tide line.

After a moment, Kes added beneath it, Extraordinary Valor.

He was tempted to finish sorting through the cargo, too, to distract himself from the names and that lingering patient death alarm that he couldn't bring himself to mute again. Kes stopped him. "We can't keep using up your power this way. I can do it in the morning."

Who's the doctor here, he might have retorted, a few weeks before. But between the strain of the past hours and the awkwardness of the past few weeks, it didn't seem worth it. Instead, he followed her back into the shuttle, where she choked down a fluid pouch and a ration bar. There in the dark, not risking a light, she finally answered his last question.

"It was 8472."

He didn't say anything, but she shook her head a bit, almost as if the crew roster were scrolling in there too. "I may doubt this later. I may start thinking it was friendship, or sentiment, or selfishness. Please, remember this for me. Right now, I'm certain. They may have used me to spy on the ship, but by the end, they knew the Borg were both their enemy and ours. And once it was clear we were losing…"

She lifted her hands. "They spoke to me. It wasn't words. But put in words, it would have been, 'You, and the maker of the many little deaths. You are your people's final weapon.'

"And I already didn't expect to make it out at all, and I'd already been thinking about how you could function, here - so why not die in sickbay, trying to bring you out with me? All of you, in a form that could last a while with us." She glanced over at the surf with its inadequate grave. "Blain was on his way to the lifepods. He found me trying to wheel the pieces of your setup down the hall, after we lost antigrav." Her bleak look told him what that slow crawl down empty, half-assimilated hallways must have been like. "He helped me get all this" – she gestured back to the assemblage of his physical self – "to the shuttle bay; he got you in and reconnected. I wouldn't have made it."

The Doctor was silent for a long moment. Many little deaths. A fair name for the biomolecular nanites he'd designed against them, but being known to an entire species as the maker of death sent another tremor through his matrix. Still fair, though. He, too, would have to take his medicine.

But trading Blain for himself…it seemed he should try to weigh that somehow. For a final weapon, whatever that meant, but he wasn't one. Deletion would be better than building something like those nanites again. Even if, just now, he felt he could have burned the whole Collective down from the sky, if the ethical restraints in his code would have allowed it.

Yet no one had yet gone right discounting Kes' visions, either. And if the drones that had traveled on Voyager with them had picked up a hint of 8472's link to her, it might also explain why they'd bothered to fire on escape pods. To nip her in the bud as potential threat, or, more likely, to deny 8472 a chance to keep spying.

Borg logic. If the target is on one of forty vessels, shoot them all.

And if he suspected 8472 might simply have lied to Kes, for reasons best known to themselves, there was no point quibbling now.

"Whatever they meant," he said finally, instead, "Given Ocampan physiology, you're immobilized for the next three weeks. Under protocol, our goals till then are survival and evasion, till the others find us or you're healed enough to travel. If a way we can serve as 'a weapon' becomes apparent in that time, all the better. Until it does, I think you're correct - we should save my power supply for when you determine the status of the others."

Saying it, he hated the pedantic sound of his own voice, the distance in it. But with the immediate crisis past, he was back where he'd been for weeks. Their argument at the Mikhal outpost about her lapse in work performance ringing in his ears, and his own shame over his foolishness in letting his alter-self develop burning in his processor. And his entire program unequipped to address the gap forming between them.

Not of anger, but worse, a divergence of purpose. From the first person to see him as a person, the only one to have done more than tut about it when his matrix had broken down. A loss as ponderous and unstoppable as two vessels parting company, as they both looked on from the viewports. Avoiding her after the malfunction, though he'd intended it to avoid bringing up her bad memories, had felt less like a choice than a final act of acceptance.

Until luck and an enemy's counsel had landed them here.

It was full night by then, but in the diffuse silvery glow from the planet's dust rings through the viewport, he saw her draw breath to say something, and then change her mind and nod. "I know. But tonight…"

"No." He tried for a gentler tone this time. "I'll stay on tonight." If the Borg could have traced his emitter output, they'd have been there already. And they would know the survivors hadn't slept in twenty-five hours; if they meant to tie up loose ends, it would most likely be soon.

Absurd, regardless, to think a holographic noncombatant would change the outcome if they did. But he went to the viewport and peered out at the surf.

Kes dug out a survival blanket and lay back on the cargo bench next to the shuttle's phaser rifle, which she'd just read the operating instructions for. As if that would change the outcome, either.

Every time he shut down the scrolling of the crew roster, it started back up again. He got up, went out and checked the sand to make sure the waves had wiped out Blain's epitaph. Then he took a seat beside the bunk, where he could command a view of the dark shore, and watched the names roll by as he waited for dawn.

. . . . . . . .

The first days passed with no sign of the others. Twice the first morning, Borg craft skimmed past on the horizon out at sea, apparently unable to pick up her life signs.

That small mercy was, presumably, some property of the planet. They would have to take that on faith; even if their cargo had included a materials lab, they wouldn't have dared run it to confirm.

Then the Borg craft stopped coming, too.

Perhaps the silence only meant that they were hidden from their friends too, who would have landed together in a cluster if they landed at all. If Kes' life signs weren't betraying her, might as well assume the same applied to the others, and all were fine.

In full daylight, the sand still had the silvery sheen they'd first seen at night. The pale green leaves and grasses shimmered with it at some angles too, making all the land around them throw off odd flashes of light in the breeze, so that they both kept thinking they saw movement nearby. Then at night, the light of the planet's rings reflected off the Cube overhead, in geosynchronous orbit over the ocean, whenever the clouds broke. At least, that was rare; most days were gray and drizzly.

Hiding in the sand, protected by unknown principles that might change without notice, with false movement all around, kept them both on edge. To complete the unease, though the crew names had mostly stopped scrolling, his internal timed reminders for their health checks kept popping up. Ensign Wildman's six-week stress fracture followup; Lieutenant Kim's annual eczema vaccine booster.

At first he climbed the cliffs every day to survey for the others. When the emitter battery dropped below two hours, he began to stretch the intervals longer. After a week, he also stopped activating to keep watch all night, instead flickering into existence for minutes at a time, making momentary forays into the craggy jungle inland for plant life samples. Half for results and half for distraction, they began assessing how to use them to stretch food supplies. After all, any day, they assured each other, might bring more mouths to feed.

Even that project had mixed results. The local wood sank in water, so no fishing rafts were in the future. Then one lush-looking fruiting vine turned out to have a neurotoxin; half a gram turned Kes' mouth numb for hours. But they did at last find some species that were just edible, though fibrous, tough, and in need of a good soak-and-boil to coax out any calories. In the second week, able to hobble short distances now, Kes planted those with hand tools from cargo, a sort of jumbled understory garden of vegetables, grains and even berry shoots beneath the nearest stretch of forest canopy.

At first he took the berries as a sign that she, too, expected no rescue; from the growth they'd seen so far, it would be years before her first harvest. But then his permanent memory spun up, late but on point, with the years-old footage from the aeroponics bay fire. The way, under another Ocampa's guidance, she'd turned all the racks of fresh seedlings into a lush caloric jungle in seconds. Admittedly, those were the seconds before she'd lost control and incinerated them all, but here she was - why not try again?

In fact, it occurred to him, for her, this might be a barren planet at the wrong end of a tragedy, but it was also a planet. A place to stretch one's legs, physical and otherwise, without the fear of punching a hole into vacuum.

But Kes didn't seem to feel the same. Most of the time, she was clearly intent on the missions, concealment and survival. Other times, when he activated, he found her just sitting at the pilot's seat with her head in her hands, and sat there silently beside her for a minute or two, as his power ticked down.

He had dredged Voyager's databases years before, to expand his psychological counseling toolkit. But he'd never gotten much chance to practice; after a visit or two, even the worst-affected crew had implausibly claimed to be cured and stopped coming.

"Kes," he said in the second week, over her dinner, the night they agreed to suspend his survey trips entirely, "You're aware I'm versed in sixty-one styles of trauma counseling, specialized for two dozen species."

He was the last person suitable to counsel her on recent traumas. He was also the last person, full stop.

She looked up and made a visible attempt to smile. "Sorry."

He shook his head. "There's no reason to apologize. It's just that it would be a reasonable use of the energy supply at this point, if it's affecting your performance." The words were exactly what he meant – they didn't have energy to spend on anything less urgent – but even he could hear how they sounded. Trying to soften his tone, but without processing it properly, he went on. "I'm not much help otherwise."

His own frustration, usually the one emotion he was fully in touch with, hadn't been clear to him till then. Now he felt it fully. Tethered in place on a slowly waning power supply, without medical equipment or information on the well-being of the people under his care, watching the only one left to him trying to mourn.

"I don't mean to worry you. It's that I've been trying to use techniques Tuvok taught me. I know they're only for the short term. I won't abuse them. But…"

He finished, understanding. "It's also a way to honor him."

She covered her face with her hands again for a moment, the too-big sleeves of one of the shuttle's spare uniforms slipping down to her elbows.

After a moment, he abandoned his incipient treatment plan for a simpler one. He was reasonably sure that as qualifications for and against offering comfort went, years of friendship outranked an hour of malfunction. He shifted beside her, shoulder to shoulder.

He was apparently right; she leaned her head on his. He pulled her close. Not a comfortable position for a humanoid for more than a few minutes, despite their inexplicable insistence on doing it in times like these. But for the moment, for a change, it seemed to have helped.

"Ocampa lose loved ones all the time, across our lives," she said after a minute. "I should handle this better than humans, or faster. I'm trying to. But you…for your matrix, this must be so violating."

I keep trying to revise my estimate of the crew complement, but it won't take, he didn't say. Finally, he went with, "Ensign Jakov's monthly tooth filing was scheduled for today. I should at least suspend the reminders. But I keep forgetting."

Kes nodded. Her hand behind him splayed out on his shoulder.

"You're wrong, you know," she said after a minute. The vibration of her chest resonated right through her scapula under his forearm. "About not being much help. Keeping you active…it is an indulgence, but I don't think it's a waste. It seems to matter, being reminded of all our lives together, not being alone."

You are alone, he thought. You're perhaps the only living humanoid on this planet, and no help is coming from the sky. What you have is the cryptic words of a species that sees you as a tool, plus five packs of neural gel and a petaram's worth of processor, slowly running out of power. What you need is your colleagues, and a warp-capable ship, and another last-minute twist that brings them here, all of them, somehow safe and well after all. Perhaps with a few minor lacerations on Paris' pretty face.

Then, angry at himself, he thought, no. What we need is to find a different source of power.