"They've entered the cargo bay," Carey announced, with a sigh of relief.

"Initiate the lock-down of the cargo bay exits, wait twenty minutes to allow Tom enough time to hopefully obtain the name of the last operative, then proceed with the 'meteor-storm'," Kathryn ordered. 

Chakotay met her grim look with a bland expression, but she could see fear sparking deep inside his dark soulful eyes. She reached forward and squeezed his arm comfortingly.

"We *will* get Tom out of there safely," she promised, although she didn't blame him for doubting her assurances. Without the ability to see what was happening inside the cargo bay, it was impossible to guarantee that nothing would go wrong.

~#~#~#~

"Lieutenant Paris, Crewman Dalby, you're late," Tuvok snapped, as they entered the cargo bay. "This is a planned mutiny, not a social gathering. Punctuality is not optional."

A dozen people swiveled their heads to watch the pair enter, several of them openly smirking at Tom's obvious discomfiture. Without halting their forward motion, Tom somehow managed to simultaneously press his back against the comfort of Dalby's chest and Ken, feeling the minute tremors of fear running through their interlinked hands, instinctively moved around and ahead of Tom, so that his body became a barrier between the pilot and Tuvok's cold eyes.

"I had second thoughts about attending at all," he stated loudly. "It took Tom a little time to convince me."

There were several loud snickers from the assembled crew. Ken felt the heat of Tom's blush and squeezed his fingers apologetically. Tom pressed back, a soft touch of acceptance and forgiveness. He was too well-used to being considered a whore to take offense at Ken using that argument to deflect Tuvok's ire.

"Is everyone here now?" Henley demanded, dismissing Ken and Tom with a contemptuous snort.

"There is one further FIA operative on Voyager," Tuvok replied. "However, that person has not yet acknowledged my authority in this situation."

"You mean even your pet slut can't convince them?" Henley mocked.

"We've run out of time," Tuvok replied. "We move tonight. If she survives the take-over, then the Lieutenant can attempt to use his unique 'skills' to persuade her to our way of thinking *after* we've taken control of the ship."

"Tom is *mine*," Ken growled, bristling with anger. "The only 'skill' he'll be offering you from now on is his ability to fly this ship."

"Paris is an FIA operative," Tuvok replied coldly. "He will follow whatever orders he is given. His unique abilities were created by, and are owned by, the FIA. He is a tool. Nothing more and nothing less. I suggest you think very carefully before risking your own career over a self-acknowledged slut."

"Yeah?" Ken drawled. "Well he's *my* slut and I'm not sharing him. If you've got a problem with that, both he and I are out of here now."

Although Tuvok's expression didn't change, his whole body somehow began to radiate menace and several of the gathered crew turned hostile, speculative glances at Dalby in anticipation of Tuvok's response.  Fearing for Ken's safety, Tom leapt forward to diffuse the tension.

"If…if I get the last operative to join us, would you agree *then* that I can belong just to Ken?" Tom asked quietly.

"Once your mission is completed and you have done your duty to the FIA, I have no interest in *whom* you whore yourself to afterwards," Tuvok agreed, regarding Tom with complete distaste.

"No, Tom. You don't have to agree to this," Ken argued.

"I do," Tom replied. "Commander Tuvok is right. It's my duty to complete my assignment." He turned to face the Vulcan. "Who is my target, Sir?" 

Tuvok frowned slightly, then gave an almost imperceptible shrug of acceptance. 

"The operative who is refusing to co-oper…"

There was an almost deafening crash and the whole ship rocked abruptly, sending several of the gathered crewmembers to their knees. Tom staggered but kept his feet, turning to cling at Ken's arm as a further volley of impacts against the shield kept the floor beneath them shuddering with bone-jarring violence. Then the overhead lights went out and they were plunged into terrifying darkness.

"Voyager's under attack," Tom blurted, as the ululating wail of a red-alert ripped through the cargo-bay and the emergency lights flickered on, casting a scarlet haze over the frightened faces around him. He angrily banged his open palm against his unresponsive comm. badge.

"Communications appear to be out," Tuvok announced blandly, after trying unsuccessfully to use his own communicator. His posture was calm, seemingly unaffected by the people milling in panic around him.

"We've got to get to our stations," Tom insisted, rushing to the exit door. Only the fact that he was still dragging Ken in his wake prevented him from running headlong into the door when it failed to open.

"Let's try the manual over-ride," Ken suggested, not allowing his gut-churning tension to show in his expression. This was just too damned convenient, in his opinion. The would-be mutineers were now isolated, cut off from communications and horrifically vulnerable. He had a sinking suspicion that it wasn't the ship under attack but the mutineers themselves.

"It won't work," Tom announced, his blue-eyes bright with fear. "The mechanism's stuck."

"Then we'll just shoot our way out," Jackson growled, staggering over to the weapons locker and starting to hand out the phaser-rifles. 

"Get out of the way, Tom," Ken warned, seeing the look of panic in the other mutineers' eyes. He wouldn't put it past any of them to start shooting while Tom was still in their line of fire.

"There could be people outside trying to get the door open from their end," Tom argued. "If we fire at the door, we could kill anyone on the other side who's trying to let us out."

Ken grabbed Tom by the arm in a bruising grip and began to drag him back to the external bay doors.

"What are you doing?" Tom demanded, squirming angrily as Ken hauled him away. "You're hurting me."

"They aren't listening to you, Tom. We've got to get away from that door because even if it does open, it won't be a rescue team that comes through it.

"What?"

"It's a trap, Tom. I think this whole thing was a set-up. The Captain must have found out about the mutiny. There's no external attack. I think they just want to cause panic in here before the Security Team come through to arrest everyone. If they *are* intending to arrest us. It's equally possible they will just shoot down anyone carrying a rifle and I doubt their own weapons will be set on stun. Our only chance is to keep back, put our arms in the air to prove we're no threat and pray like fuck that they let us surrender."

"Oh shit," Tom gasped, his eyes glazing as realization finally struck him. He gagged, doubling over to retch violently.

"It's okay, Tom. I'll look after you, I swear," Ken said helplessly, wrapping his arms firmly around Tom's heaving body and bracing his own legs to support their dual weight against the rocking of the ship. 

Tom twisted his head so that he was facing Ken. Even in the red flashing glow of the emergency lights, Tom's face was pasty and his eyes were so huge and dark they looked almost black. There was no mistaking the distraught expression on his fine features and Ken swallowed heavily, sickened by Tom's obvious fear.

"Please, honey. Don't be scared," he begged. "I swear I won't let anything happen to you."

"You…you don't understand," Tom replied lifelessly, so stunned by the depth of this latest betrayal that his tone was cold and emotionless. The clipped words carried clearly despite the panicked cries that filled the room.

Ken wrapped his arms around the younger man, hugging the thin, trembling body into his protective warmth.

"What don't I understand?" he asked quietly.

"This is my fault," Tom whispered. "But I didn't know. I didn't. I swear I didn't know."

"What didn't you know?"

"She said she was FIA. That she just wanted to make a fool of Tuvok. I…I thought she wanted to discredit him. That's all. I swear. I didn't know."

"Who, Tom?"

"The Captain," Tom whimpered, dropping his eyes in shame and stiffening his body in expectation of a blow.

"The Captain knew about this intended mutiny?" Ken demanded, his voice tight. "You were reporting to her? Spying for her?"

"Yes," Tom agreed listlessly.

"Why didn't you tell me, Tom? When I said we should go see her together, why didn't you tell me?" Ken asked angrily.

"I…I couldn't. She said I couldn't tell *anyone*. I thought she was FIA. Only…only she can't be, can she?"

"No, Tom. I highly doubt that she is," Ken replied, with restraint.

"I'm so fucking stupid," Tom moaned.

Ken's fingers tightened around Tom's shoulders, biting painfully into soft flesh as he thrust the younger man away from himself just enough to stare deeply into the guilt-ridden blue eyes.

"You're not stupid, Tom. You're naïve, perhaps, or maybe you've just been programmed for too many years to have the ability to stand up for yourself against *any* authority figure who understands your nature well enough to take advantage of your vulnerabilities. Janeway's probably SCC. It's the only thing that would explain how she'd have enough knowledge of how your mind works to trick you like this."

"I'm sorry," Tom whimpered helplessly.

"I'm not," Ken replied thoughtfully. "If she *is* SCC, then she might be ruthless but she's not necessarily a threat to you. You're too damned useful to kill, Tom. Besides, given who your father is, there would be a lot of political mileage to be gained from producing live evidence that Admiral Paris turned his own son into a mod."

"You know?" Tom asked, his wounded eyes filling with fresh tears.

"I didn't *know*, but it was the only thing that made sense," Ken replied softly. "It's not your fault, kid, and it's not who you *are* so I never brought it up."

"You don't think I'm a monster?" Tom asked fearfully.

"The only monster in the Paris family is your bastard father," Ken replied, drawing Tom back into his arms and kissing him gently on the head. "It'll be okay, Tom. Somehow, we'll work this out. You're not on your own anymore."

Tom stared wonderingly at Ken's soft expression and slowly began to relax in the older man's arms. The rocking ship, the sound of rifles firing against the locked door, the angry screams of the mutineers, the ricocheting sound of supposed multiple impacts on the external shields, all of these faded into white noise as he drowned in the gentle gaze of the man who held him.

And then the wall behind Ken's head exploded.

In less time than it took to blink twice, the gray hull was replaced by an expanse of space. The clear picture of black vacuum and white stars was blurred slightly by the internal force field that had leapt to fill the gap so quickly that none of the occupants of the cargo bay had even felt the room's momentary attempt to decompress. The floor around Tom's feet was strewn with ripped metal. His ears were still ringing from the explosion as he slowly shook his head in shock.

There was a dull throbbing in his left upper thigh but it was only when he looked down and saw the twisted shard of steel imbedded in his flesh and the blood pouring down his leg to pool on the floor that he became aware of an intense sensation of pain. With the sharp intrusion of that pain, his ears stopped ringing and focused instead on the screams of the people around him. The voices had changed. Fear and pain had replaced the angry mutterings of mutiny.

A large section of the exploded door was lying on the floor to his left. A crushed, blood-drenched arm extending from under its jagged edge was the only evidence that a body was crushed beneath it. To his right, Henley was on her knees with a deep gash in her forehead and a phaser-rifle half-buried in her abdomen. The compression-wave that had driven her weapon into her body had snapped both of her arms, so her glazed, agonized eyes met Tom's in a mute plea for help then dropped once more to stare at the protrusion from her abdomen.

"You okay?" he whispered at Ken, relieved to see the older man was still smiling, even though his eyes seemed glazed with pain.

Tom inched his fingers around Ken's ribs, flinching as he felt the sharp edges of the numerous metallic shards that had lodged in Ken's back. Tom sobbed, realizing the only reason he himself had suffered only one relatively minor wound was that Ken's body had protected his.

"Ken?" he cried, "KEN?"

Ken's face twisted , becoming a grimace of pain as he struggled to speak. "Tom," he gasped, and then blood bubbled at his lips.

"Don't try to talk," Tom replied, trying to ease himself out of Ken's rib-crushing embrace so that he could help lower the older man down to the floor. "I think one of your lungs has been pierced," he continued. "You need to let go of me, let me find a med-kit."

"Love you," Ken gasped, forcing the words to gargle through the blood that was choking his throat. "I love you, Tom."

"Shush," Tom pleaded, too blinded by the sudden tears that blurred his eyes at Ken's tortured words to see the light dying in the older man's face. The arms around him began to relax, allowing him to step back from Ken's embrace. Whatever momentary relief he felt was immediately eradicated as Ken sagged and collapsed against him, driving them both to their knees.

"Ken?" he wailed, oblivious to the chaos around him, his concentration purely on the strangely peaceful expression that replaced the pain on Ken's face.

Ken smiled sadly.

"Goodbye, kid," he gasped.

And he died.

"Nooooooooooo," Tom howled, scrambling back on his knees away from Ken's corpse, barely even aware of instinctively ripping the shrapnel out of his thigh before it ripped any more flesh open. Then he felt a blow across his right cheek, the sharp impact of an open palm. He turned stunned eyes to see the cold, implacable face of Tuvok glaring down at him.

"He is dead," Tuvok snapped. "We are not. We have to get the door open before the force field fails or we will *all* die."

Tom looked out at the cold expanse of space, uncertain whether it was the flickering of the force field or his tears that were making the stars blur, and he shrugged.

"I don't care," he said dully. Ken was dead. Ken had loved him, had saved his life and now Ken was dead.

Before Tuvok could respond, a sharp sound like a whip-crack echoed through the cargo-bay. Someone screamed, a high-pitched wail of terror, and then the room filled with a roaring, rushing sound like an angry wave as the force field that separated them from space collapsed. It took less than a second for the room to depressurize, for anything not bolted down to be snatched up and dragged towards the vacuum. Bodies, cargo, weapons all swirling through the air, smashing against each other as they tumbled out into the vacuum.

Tom watched as Tuvok was hauled up, as though by invisible arms, his face contorting with almost-human terror, his limbs flailing uselessly as he was suctioned out of the ship. Tom winced as Tuvok collided with Henley, their impact sending a shower of blood into the air that immediately dissolved into tiny red-droplets and proceeded the bodies into space. And in that second or two of observing, he was too numb with shock to even identify the tingling sensation of his body or to understand why he wasn't following the other FIA members to their death in space. Even as he began to dissolve into the familiar pattern of a transporter stream, all he was truly aware of was that Ken was dead.

"It's my fault," Tom whispered, as he watched Ken's broken body tumble away into the vacuum. "It's all my fault."

~#~#~#~

"I'll give him another dose of dopamine and try the cortical stimulator again."

~I love you Tom~

No...Ken....I'm sorry. Please, I'm sorry. Don't die. Don't leave me.

"It's not working. Blood-pressure still dropping. Heart-beat irregular."

~Goodbye, Kid ~

NO.  Please.

"We're losing him."

~You fucking bastard, you fucking little whore! ~

Chakotay?

~You made me love you, you bastard. You used me~

"I can't stabilize his lifesigns, Captain."

I loved you, Chakotay. I did. I swear I did. I'm sorry.

~Like you loved Ken? You destroyed me. You killed Ken. Is that what your love is, Tom Paris?~

"I don't understand. What the hell's wrong with him? It's just a leg-injury."

~I think you need to pay a penalty, Tom, for wanting someone else to have what is mine~

No, Dukat. I'm sorry. I was just pretending. Honest. I'm yours. Don't...don't hurt them. Don't take them from me.

"A severe leg injury. He suffered extensive blood-loss, exacerbated by the decompression of the cargo bay. The blood was literally sucked out of his body when the force field collapsed."

~ Don't defy me, Tom. No one will help you once you're a mod. You'll have nowhere to turn. Betray your secret to my enemies and it will be *you* who is put to death. ~

Please, Dad. Don't do this to me. I'll be good. I promise. You don't have to do this to me. Please...I'm begging you.

"He's in hypovolemic shock. The transfusions haven't stabilized his blood pressure and I'm beginning to read extensive kidney damage. It's possible he won't pull through, Captain."

~You’ve been assigned, Paris. You know better than to refuse an order. Intelligence doesn’t accept no for an answer~

I'm lost. I don't know what to do. Who to trust. 

"Not Tom. With his modifications, that thigh wound is barely a scratch. He's recovered from far more severe injuries in the past."

~Tom, you are what you are. It doesn't make any difference ~

Harry. I'm scared Harry. I killed him. He loved me and I killed him. It was all a trick. The Captain used me. She...she used me, Harry.

"Perhaps the problem is that he doesn't *want* to recover this time."

~Have another cup of coffee. Oh, and I'm sure you've got room for another muffin or two ~

YOU USED ME!

"I don't care whether he *wants* to recover. Tom Paris is not going to die, do you hear me?"

"I'm a Doctor, not a miracle worker. I don't have the facilities on board this ship to treat this level of injury in a patient who has no will to live and I can't make my patient *want* to survive."

Ken. Where are you, Ken?  Please. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I made you go to the cargo bay. I'm sorry I killed you. Please, Ken. I'm sorry you loved me.

"Then, if it looks like you're going to lose him, stabilize him and put him in stasis with Tuvok."

"If I could stabilize him, I wouldn't lose him!"

TUVOK? You're alive?

~No thanks to you, Paris. You betrayed me. You betrayed us all. You killed them. You killed Ken. He loved you and you stabbed him in the back. Just like you betrayed Chakotay. Just like you betrayed your father. You're poison, Paris. You destroy anyone you touch~

"Blood pressure's dropped again. He's flat-lining."

~Do the universe a favor and just die, you monster~

DAD? Dad...don't turn away from me. Please...I'm sorry. Come back. Don't leave me here in this hospital. They're hurting me, Dad. Please...it hurts so bad.

"What are you doing? That's a cortical stimulator. You can't apply that kind of electrical charge to his groin, Captain."

"I know what I'm doing. He needs pain, Doctor. He's programmed to respond to pain. It's our only chance to save him." 

"I'm a doctor. I won't stand by and let you torture a patient."

"Even if it saves his life?"

~He's our best yet, don't you think? He's so damn fuckable. I can't wait to try him out and see how well the new neurological re-mapping has worked. Van Hausen says he'll not only survive levels of pain that none of the other mod's have managed, but that he'll be sexually insatiable whenever he's in agony~

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

"I don't understand. He's reacting favorably to the pain. His lifesigns are stabilizing. How is that possible?"

"He's a mod, Doctor. Let's both pray we never have to take advantage of that fact again."

"He's...um...he appears to be sexually aroused."

"Is he regaining consciousness?"

"He will shortly."

"Then it's time for me to leave. My presence will just upset him at this point and, besides, the Commander's better equipped to....um...handle his recuperation. I'll be on the bridge if you need me."

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