Disclaimers, ratings and warnings are in Part 1.

THE BADLANDERS

PART TWENTY THREE

Harry Kim's eyes were on the back of Paris and Locarno who were  sitting at the conn of the shuttle Tiberius, one of the Audensberg's three type 11 shuttles. They were all in Starfleet uniform.

"Remember," Captain Bon had said two hours ago, "you're all dead."

Even before they had started on the shuttle simulation, Bon informed them that Voyager was destroyed in the Badlands and its entire crew with her. That had been the official communiqué that had been circulated throughout the Federation a week ago.

"Let me guess, Captain," said Tom, "Admiral Owen Paris sent out the communiqué."

"Yes. It came from his office, by his instruction."

"And no doubt, the Maquis was responsible for destroying the ship and its crew," Nick added.

"Well, now you know that there were survivors. Ten of them," Tom said bitterly. "Ensign Kim and Lieutenant Locarno are two of those ten survivors, as well as Captain Janeway - "

"Kathryn Janeway is alive?"

Bon had sounded incredulous.

"And so are Lieutenant-Commander Tuvok, Doctor Krell and Lieutenant-Commander Rollei..."

"Just what did the communiqué say?" Tom had asked, his eyes narrowing.

And then Captain Bon had let them read the communiqué.

It read like an obituary.

Dead: Captain Kathryn Janeway.

Dead: Commander Ordell Cavit

Dead: Doctor Krell, Chief Medical Officer

Dead: Lieutenant-Commander Tuvok and Lieutenant-Commander Rollei.

The full crew complement of the USS Voyager listed and commendations, commemorations and memorial services held for the dead.

All organised by the office of Admiral Owen McKenzie Paris.

He really wanted Voyager wiped from the skies of the Alpha Quadrant.

That had been their first shock and hardly had they recovered from that, when they learned that Voyager had been sabotaged, its crew murdered.

Died in the Badlands.

Engineered by none other than Admiral Owen McKenzie Paris.

What did he have against Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay? Harry wondered.

Tom and Nick were talking softly and Eldred Dickson was sitting at a console opposite him, getting up to date on the Federation news and scientific advances that had been made in the last six months. He had family on Earth as they learned, but while with them on their mission, they had made it clear that he not let them know he was alive and on his way home.

Harry had been busy the last hour disguising their signals and identities so that they were ostensibly crew of the Audensberg making their way to Utopia Planitia. They all now had Federation communicator pins, Tom and Nick dressed in command red, he in gold and Dickson in the familiar teal of science.

"There, I'm done. We have clearance for Utopia Planitia, gentlemen," he said as he finished.

"Thanks, Harry," Tom replied, glancing backwards quickly and giving him a smirk.

He had gotten used to seeing that smirk, but on Nick's face. Tom was hardly any different.

Harry grimaced.

He knew he should hate Tom Paris forever. He knew that what Tom did to him was criminal and humiliating. He had been subjected to all kinds of crude sexual depravity, from Tom, from his friends, gang-raped when he wouldn't comply, gang-raped until he submitted willingly to them. He didn't know what was worse - the gang-rapes or those in which Tom alone humiliated him to the point that he no longer thought of himself as Harry Kim, but as a tool, an object with fuckholes. His mouth and his ass - what did it matter? And then Tom sometimes brought in Torres, and while Dalby and Tom worked him front and back, Tom would frig his cock until he got ramrod stiff, against his will find the quick rubbing of his cock sensual. Torres had no morals. She would strip down, calmly slide beneath him and Tom would press him down on her until he filled her.

Harry closed his eyes and died again of the unknown, unbidden lust that got him to fuck Torres until he spilled like a seed fountain in her. Dalby's hands would rub his cheeks and he'd say, "Good boy, Harry" while Tom's cock kept pumping up his ass. Eventually, he found even that soothing, the sliding in and out to the tip, then pounding hard into him.

In Tom's cabin he had never been dressed. He was always naked, and even when they walked him to Dalby or Ayala's cabin, he would walk naked down the corridor, always flanked by two males.

That first day in the cargo bay when Tom had brazenly kissed him in front of everyone, he had felt the way his body heated up. Shocked by what he was experiencing his mouth opened, letting Tom's tongue slide in effortlessly. He tasted a man's tongue in his mouth. It had never happened to him. He had never thought it would ever happen, and yet right there, a man was making love to him.

His lips had burned and his erection was plain for Tom and his friends to see. He wanted to die of shame. Blue-blue eyes, a quirky smile and a hard cock up his ass. That was his fate on the Liberty. After their games during the day when they had finished their shifts, Tom never left him out of his sight. He slept with Tom, spooned against Tom's body so that Tom had easy access to gripping his cock he had already caressed to hardness. He could feel Tom's erection pressing into him. Sometimes, completely exhausted, he'd fall asleep like that, even moaning in his half slumber as he enjoyed the slow pumping.

In the middle of the night, he'd feel movement. He would be on his back while Tom kissed him sensually to wakefulness. Tom's breath mingling with his, lips that sought, not hungrily, but deliberately teasing until he kissed back, probing his own tongue in Tom's mouth, nipping the lower lip, feeling the unaccustomed softness and the moist of it burning through his whole body. For minutes they would lie close, locked in embrace, kissing one another with heady sensual lust. Tom's hands, fascinated with his hair, always played there while they kissed, then the mouth would start to roam, down to the jaw, his tongue grazing over the stubble, creating an unbearably sexy raspy sound. Then the tongue would find the hollow in his neck and tickle him till he sputtered with pleasure. Or, he would trace the route down Tom's chest to the navel, dip his tongue there and later, hover uncertainly at his cock, now hot and hard and inviting. And all the time he burned to have Tom's cock in his mouth, or his ass, feeling it move slowly in until he was filled to the hilt. He'd groan from pure agony and pleasure, and when he'd give in to the pleasure, try to bank it down. By then it was too late.

"Shhh... Let it go, sweetheart...let it go... Be yourself..."

Only then he'd give himself to the breathless, the giddy ecstasy of being made love to by Tom. Into the early hours they would make love until exhausted, they would fall asleep. In the morning, the shame would be in his eyes again as he opened them only to find Tom had already been sucking him and his erection so painful that Tom would bend over  and say, "Here, this one's for you..."

He hated it. He hated Tom. He hated most that he could give in so quickly. Pretty soon he was as lustfully on heat as Tom was. Then Tom would sit propped against the headboard, legs open and he would be there, sucking the engorged flesh.

"That's it, darling, gently now. No teeth, okay? Shhh..." 

He would make love to Tom's cock, lick it, take him in his mouth, press his lips close and work slowly down to the base, blowing hot air, then grazing upwards to the tip again. Thoroughly work his way all over the flesh, the balls, squeezing gently, making them moist, flicking along the base back to the tip again.

"That's good..." Tom would murmur with half closed eyes. "Now, Harry, let me fuck you..."

Only then Tom would move to a kneeling position, and ram his well oiled cock down his throat.

Harry sighed again.

After a while, God help him, he was beginning to enjoy it.

He began to enjoy it and Tom was quick to sense it. It was a bizarre situation. He was a prisoner, a love toy, a slave who had to fuck Torres or other women of the Maquis at Tom's whim, but at night, be belonged to Tom only. It was the only time he relished, because it was a way of escaping being eaten up by a gang.

Now, sitting in the Tiberius, on their way to Utopia Planitia, he looked at Tom, stealing glances from time to time so that Dickson wouldn't notice anything. But Dickson had to know. Harry shook his head. He had a fantasy - for that was what he was beginning to have - of being on a bed, propped against pillows with Tom sucking him off, making love to his cock like he had to do to Tom. He'd run his fingers through Tom's hair, stroke the cheek that stood slightly rounded as his cock filled Tom's mouth, feel the total sensuality of the movement and lose himself in the ecstasy of it. Later they would lie

together and he'd spend a full ten minutes just kissing the blonde, blue-eyed Badlands Bay Boy.

Like it or not, he had begun to enjoy being Tom's lover.

It was a thought that horrified him as much as it fascinated him.

Being a hostage, and falling for the hostage taker.

He was wakened from his prurient thoughts by Dickson who pointed to his bulging crotch. In abject shame he covered himself with his hands, trying to hide his erection. He must have blushed deeply for his face was on fire.

"It's okay," Dickson whispered as he moved closer so that the others couldn't hear. "I know how you feel...about him..."

********

Leah Brahms listened with shock to the four men who stood in her office. According to all reports, these men were supposed to be dead. But most shocking was that there were survivors of the Voyager disaster and two of them were here. Harry Kim and Nick Locarno. She had done a double take when she laid eyes on Nick, thinking him to be Tom Paris, until Paris followed just behind him. Both were in red uniforms and almost identical in appearance.

"And you say that Captain Janeway has survived the crash?"

They all stood on attention until she clucked impatiently. "At ease, gentlemen."

Immediately they relaxed their stance, yet all looked really serious. And after what they just told her, she thought they were pulling her leg.

"She is alive, Doctor Brahms," Nick Locarno answered. "Alive and well."

"I shouldn't ask where she is, is that it?"

"For the time being, no," said Tom. "Look, Doctor, this is Lieutenant Eldred Dickson and he served on the Audensberg. He is our munitions expert."

"You arrived here in one of her shuttles, cloaked as Audensberg officers. I understand the need for secrecy, if what you've just told me is true. I am not saying you are lying to me, gentlemen, but it's impossible to have breached security here and programme Voyager's weapons array to self-destruct without a Captain's authorisation.

"Doctor, we have the proof here," Tom said, holding a data pad in his hand. "It's a holodeck simulation of the last minutes before Voyager exploded. Captain Chakotay - "

"Chakotay? Isn't he - ?"

"Dead?"

"No, that's not what I meant, Tom Paris. And I think you know what I mean."

She watched as Tom looked to the others, as if he knew something he didn't want them to know. The indecision lasted only a few seconds.

"Yes, Doctor. Chakotay is her husband - "

"What?" exclaimed Eldred Dickson.

"I knew it!" chorused Nick and Harry, and Nick added, "So much makes sense now..."

"It does. Gentlemen, let me view the simulation..." She gestured they leave and followed them outside. "Follow me..."

The first holosuite was the best one, she thought as she keyed in her codes and the doors opened.

Fifteen minutes later she stood as she had when she entered - completely still. Only this time her eyes were moist from unshed tears. A lump had formed in her throat and speaking was laboured.

"This cannot be..."

"That's what I thought as well, Doctor," Harry Kim said. "What we need to find out is who did the programming."

She turned and face the four young men. They were supposed to be dead, at least two of them. They were supposed to be dead, along with their Captain and a few senior officers who survived. It was impossible to live through an explosion such as she just witnessed.

Someone killed a ship full of people. It was so clear to her ordered mind that it couldn't have happened any other way. Voyager was a brand new vessel on her maiden voyage to the Badlands. Every known diagnostic had been run and tested again and again and again. Yet somewhere, her warp core design, her engine design and the phaser and torpedo bank designs had been breached.

No persons other than herself and Admiral Krog worked on the final stages of the ship's building. Admiral Krog was the most upstanding and honourable officer she knew. A Klingon imbued with all the honour an integrity of his race, he would instantly assess that such a serious breach of security was not only a violation of Federation law, but downright cowardly. Klingons had no time for cowards.

Krog it couldn't be.

"Doctor, if I could study the schematics of the torpedo banks and programming of the torpedoes," she heard Eldred Dickson say.

A scientist, she noted absently as she ended the programme and deleted all files except what was on the data pad. She nodded mutely as she led them to another, larger compound where there were torpedo casings, torpedoes, and computers to study the data pertaining to Voyager. She watched with interest as Harry Kim assisted Dickson with great focus.

"If anyone can crack anything here, Doctor, it will be one of them. They're good," Tom said, his voice tinged with pride.

"Seems like you're quite a little crew yourself. Would you like to look at something while they're busy? I can assure you they won't be disturbed. It's in the dead of night anyway..."

They had hailed her hours before on subspace bands and requested that she set a time for them. Dead of night was the best time.

She smiled as she saw they eyes light up. Like peas in a pod they were. She had heard stories. But they were mainly stories. Yet here walked two young men, about the same age, looking like identical twins. One was the son of Admiral Owen Paris - she grimaced at the thought of that man - and the other the son of one of Starfleet's great medical officers.

She was drawn into their deception, a deception with only the best intentions at heart. They would uncover a plot, for there was a plot, one they showed her was all too real. Someone was behind the destruction of Voyager, sending the spanking new vessel into the Badlands as an added ploy, making her crash seem plausible.

They got into a hover car and soon they were near a docking port on the northern perimeter of the shipyard.

She heard them gasp.

She had their attention.

"Doctor, now there is something to make my heart go boom!" exclaimed Tom Paris.

"No need to, Tom," she heard Nick say. "I've piloted her, remember?"

"Oh no, you haven't."

"It's a replica of the good ship Voyager, Intrepid Class, dummy."

"You know you two could be brothers," she told them as she listened to their light-hearted bickering.

"We are," they chorused.

"I knew it!"

Minutes later they stood on the bridge of the ship.

"She has not been named, gentlemen."

"USS Voyager. No contest."

"Thank you. A certain admiral won't be happy."

"We don't care how a certain admiral feels, Doctor Brahms," Tom said as he seated himself at the conn while Nick took the captain's chair and she sat next to Nick.

"There's something else I want to show you. I have a feeling this ship is embarking on her maiden voyage soon." She entered a few codes on the console between the command chairs, relaying the images to the main viewscreen.

They whistled. They crowed. Nick stood up and joined Tom.

The viewscreen showed cargo bay two, with one shuttle standing in the centre - aloof, stark, sharp yet smooth lines, the bow an apex that flared towards the nacelles in the shape of a dart.

Tom turned to her, his eyes wide with wonder.

"This is my design..."

"Yes. A young Commander Janeway once came to me and told me a very angry young man designed the most beautiful and fastest shuttle in the Federation."

"Me..."

"Yes, Tom. She looked very proud that day."

"I hated her..."

"I know. She said you named the shuttle - "

"The Delta Flyer."

***************** 

END PART TWENTY THREE

PART TWENTY FOUR

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