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if everything were slightly askew.
    Like the forest before a great storm when the birds became still.
    There was nothing here he could identify as wrong, but it didn’t really seem right, either.
    There was something else, the taste of loneliness, the fear and the isolation he hadn’t experienced until he had gone to Starfleet Academy.
    During all the time he had had to be alone during his training before he left for the Academy, there was always a feeling of connection. He had been part of the world, of the many animal spirits that walked and flew and crawled around him. There were the tree spirits and the great mountains.
    When he had gone to the Academy, he had left all of that behind and he had been miserable. The academic program had taken up every moment of his waking life and then some.
    He thought he had been disciplined when he arrived at the Academy, but he had learned differently. There he found a new kind of discipline of spirit, an ability to do more, work harder, and stay up longer than he had ever imagined existed.
    But the loneliness and being cut off from the spirit world had been terrible. He had felt as if there were an invisible barrier between him and all the other cadets, that he couldn’t touch their souls.
    There were no animals, nothing from the natural world he loved, in the Academy. And so he had been terribly, wrenchingly lonely.
    But this wasn’t the place to be remembering those things, he realized with a wrench. That was long past, and now he had duties and responsibilities … And his carefully disciplined mind was drifting off as if he were drugged.
    Chakotay gripped the arms of the captain’s chair and shook himself slightly. He tried to concentrate on the familiar sights and noises of the bridge, the endless starfield on the screen, the soft padding of crew members’ feet as they walked behind him doing their work, the comforting beeps of the consoles. Yet Chakotay still felt disconnected from the rest of the crew on the bridge, even those in the meeting with the captain. Some of them were people he had served with for years, people he considered close friends.
    From here he could see Paris bent over the helm, and Ensign Mkubata at the nav where often Harry Kim was assigned. Kim was in conference with the captain now, adding his expertise where it would be most useful.
    Chakotay remembered the last game of pool he had played with Harry in Paris’s recreation of a French bar on the holodeck. He could even smell the brandy if he thought about it, feel the smooth wood of the cue in his hand.
    It did no good. The loneliness was there, assaulting him.
    He tried to unravel it, and somehow fact stood against the unflagging misery that had caught him. He had not been lonely at the Academy, he remembered with a start. There had been the entire lacrosse team and his roomates, Gregor Marchenko and Tony Long. But Gregor had been killed in the rescue mission to the Andorian colonies … and with that thought, the loneliness hit harder than ever. hakotay made a decision. He was going to ignore it. He was going to work. He had done this before.
    Only he had never felt so lonely before. Never.

CHAPTER 5
    “Sabotage?” B’Elanna Torres asked, immediately looking to the sides as if to check an enemy approach. All she could see were the few officers in the captain’s ready room. Harry Kim was on her left, studying the graphic display in the monitor over her shoulder and comparing it to his own.
    “The log clearly shows that the correct instructions were read into the system,” Tuvok said. “This is not an instance of anyone on the bridge or down in Engineering making a mistake.” Or the kind of strange intrusion they had encountered before, when an alien creature had taken over Tuvok himself. Everyone delicately refrained from reminding him.
    “If the log is correct, there is a massive malfunction in the computer system,” the Vulcan continued.
    “I started a level three diagnostic,” Torres