Title: Charm
Author: Dave Rogers
Email Address: daverogers@geocities.com
Series: VOY
Rating: PG
Codes: C/Kellin
Date Posted: 1st October 1999
                     
Summary: Sequel to "Unforgettable". Kellin was caught and returned 
to Ramura; but Tracers are nothing if not patient.

Disclaimer: Chakotay may have forgotten Kellin ever existed, but 
Paramount probably remember they own her. 



Charm



It had been hard on Chakotay, unfair even, and I didn't know whether 
I'd ever be able to make it up to him. That was the plan, though, 
and of course he'd forget the pain of losing me the second time just 
as he'd forgotten the pain of the first. That was all part of the plan 
too.



"You fell for that one, didn't you?" Curneth had contacted me almost 
the moment I beamed back from Voyager. "Be careful, Kellin. It happens 
to too many Tracers. That's why we rarely last more than twenty years 
in the job. Sooner or later we fall for the romance, the uncertainty, 
whatever - maybe just the fun of doing something wrong. Then we have 
to be brought back ourselves."

"Is that a problem?" I'd replied, trying to conceal the germ of an 
idea growing within me. "A Tracer tries to leave, we bring them back, 
they forget everything. It all ends up the same."

"Not quite," Curneth had insisted. "You lose memories, lose whatever 
you learned about Tracing - every job makes a difference, you know. In 
the end, you lose your edge. The longer you can hang on, not make any 
stupid mistakes, the longer you can stay in the job. And with your 
record..."

"My record? I've never..."

His blank stare silenced me.

"How many times?" I couldn't keep the fear and surprise from my 
voice.

"Three. And not many Tracers survive more than five."

"Survive?"

"As a Tracer, that is. The Bureau can find you a desk job."

I'd left it there, hoping he'd believe I was properly chastened, 
afraid to reveal anything by mistake. But the dreams made sense now, 
and I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind those memories 
still lived on. And this time it was worth doing something about it. 
I know the difference between romance and love, between a momentary 
attraction and a lifelong bond. Chakotay was more than just a fling.



Tracing isn't purely dedicated to bringing back runaways. Those are 
the high-profile jobs, the ones that made the Ramuran daily news 
accompanied by a diffident, usually rather embarrassed, recanting by 
the returning fugitive - as far as I know, always genuine, or at 
least it was genuine in every case I've closed. But there are the 
other jobs, the less attractive but socially just as necessary, that 
aren't posted on the bulletin board back in the Trace Bureau for all 
the juniors to see, but that would be passed on to the more 
experienced, the more trustworthy, with a quiet word from a superior 
in an empty corridor. I'd been an active Tracer for seven years 
before a hushed conversation in a darkened room had sent me after a 
young scientist who was experimenting with some little-known 
principles behind the neurolytic emitter. In the end, he'd forgotten a 
little, and I'd learned a lot more, and now he was a useful, happy 
and highly-paid metallurgist with no current experience in 
neurolytics. A job well done; case closed, except that I hadn't 
forgotten a few choice experimental results.

So after I'd met Chakotay, and returned to my ship, and diverted 
Curneth's suspicions for the time being, there was planning to be 
done, and science to be investigated. I'd been turning the basic 
principles over in my mind for two years, and only a few days of 
experimentation were needed to determine two basic principles. First: 
Memories removed by the neurolytic emitter were recoverable, although 
doing so might be difficult and was certainly impossible at present. 
Second: There was a way to protect a few seconds of memory against a 
neurolytic emitter, by activating a small bioactive device at the time 
of the experience. It was enough for the first stage of the plan. The 
rest could wait.



It was hard, of course, going back. Curneth knew, of course, and I 
knew he'd Trace me before long. No point trying too hard to hold him 
off, no point trying to stop him altogether. I was there for another 
purpose altogether, and even that was hard work. I loved Chakotay 
for his strength, his stability and his air of calm; he was like a 
mighty tree in the gale, stirred slightly but, at the root, unmoved 
and unmoveable. I hadn't realised it would make him so infuriatingly 
stubborn. But eventually, there was a time when I could see the love 
we'd shared rekindled in his eyes, and it was time.

I'd persuaded him to let me talk about their last evening together.

"You'd become much more than a friend to me, but I knew I had to go 
home, and you'd forget about me within hours. So I took the 
initiative."

"More than usual?" Damn that sense of humour. I love it, but it was in 
the way right now.

"Oh, yes." I was on my feet now, and he was watching as I walked 
around him. "I moved closer to you... I thanked you profusely for all 
your help... told you that I couldn't have done it without you..." 

There was no time for subtlety, no time for risking rejection. I sat 
in his lap, trying desperately not to blush. "And I touched you. I 
told you I... I cared very much for you... And that I wanted something 
to remember you by. And then I did this." 

And I activated the device hidden in the toe of my shoe, and I had 
something to remember him by again.



When did I start to hope that Curneth wasn't coming? Maybe then. It 
seemed that the plan was forgotten, that I was hoping that the simple, 
ill-conceived decoy attempt I'd thrown together might, against all 
odds, actually work. And then, when I'd known he was coming for me, 
the fear had been genuine, there had been no need to pretend. 
Convenient, really, I realised; my subconscious chipping in to help my 
conscious mind along the way. My fear as Voyager's doctor worked on me 
had been a little more complex than I'd let anyone realise; fear on 
the one hand that I'd lose Chakotay, lose all my memories of him 
forever - for without one memory to start from, why would I try to 
recover the rest? - and fear on the other that Voyager's amazing 
holographic surgeon would, in a characteristic act of electronic 
genius, deduce what I already knew. And make it known, of course, to 
Curneth, and by the same token to all Ramura.

Convenient, too, that the memory I'd safeguarded wasn't accessible for 
a few days after the neurolytic emitter had done its work. As I 
recalled the memory of that kiss, of the feelings it had evoked in me, 
I knew I could never have played the part that had come to me so 
naturally when we parted. Even then, there must have been some small 
recollection within me. I still needed, right at the end, to say 
something; to give him some small crumb of hope, even at the risk of 
Curneth noticing and dashing my own.

"You're such a kind person. I won't forget that." A brief smile, seen 
and returned; and then we were gone, and it was time for patience, 
stealth, and sheer hard work. Nothing unusual there for a Tracer.



There had been certain prerequisites, the building blocks of my plan. 
The first, of course, was the memory of a kiss. My work on neurolytics 
had stayed in my memory, so it was possible - though not easy, in fact 
it took over a year - to reconstruct the memory engrams and re-implant 
them. I had been unable to work any more that day, as the flood of 
recollection overwhelmed me, leaving me shaken, lonely, fearful and 
suffering an irrational craving for Terran ice cream. That was only 
the beginning, though. I knew there had to be three more parts to the 
plan.

First: oblivion. I had to understand why Ramurans remembered other 
Ramurans, and find a way to circumvent the process. If they forgot 
me, the Bureau wouldn't come looking for me. It would be hard, but 
all my friends, all my family, everyone I cared about must be 
affected. Second: distance. I'd seen roughly where in the Galaxy 
Voyager was heading, but I'd need a way to catch up with them, and if 
that Captain of theirs found a way to get them home - unlikely, but if 
anyone could circumvent the laws of time and space to get her way it 
was that Captain - I'd need to follow them there too. Finding him 
wouldn't be a problem, of course; tracking down one individual in an 
interstellar supercivilisation was all in a day's work for a Tracer. 
Third: memory. Falling in love with Chakotay again every morning had a 
nice romantic sound to it, but on the whole I'd prefer him to remember 
my birthday occasionally. This was the opposite of the first part, of 
course, so some basic research there would probably help.

It did help, in fact, in both senses. There's a pheromone that we 
Ramurans secrete that appears to work on anything with a cerebral 
cortex, blocking out the transfer of specific items from short term to 
long term memory. A second, similarly universal, performs the same 
function as the Tracer computer viruses on long term memory. There's 
a third, secreted in a similar way but tailored very specifically to 
Ramuran neurochemistry, that activates a backup set of memory transfer 
pathways, as if the ability to remember other Ramurans had evolved 
separately from, and later than, the ability to be forgotten. I'd got 
plenty of material there for a paper that would blow away half the 
Ramuran view of prehistory; a shame it would never be published. I'd 
also found ways to block, temporarily, the secretion of the third 
pheromone, and to block, rather more permanently, the secretion of the 
first two. There'd have to be some tests done, though, and I couldn't 
think of a better subject for the first than Curneth.

"Still looking for assignments?" His dry, precise voice woke me from 
a reverie in the Bureau common room. "There have been so few real 
challenges recently."

"I know," I smiled back at him, activating a micro-hypospray with 
my hidden right hand as I did so. Then I stood up and strolled 
over to the assignment board, talking as I went. "Half the fun seems 
to have gone out of the job lately. I've been thinking about a career 
move."

"Desk job?"

"Maybe something a bit more radical. I've been thinking about leaving 
the Bureau altogether." 

I could almost hear the alarms going off in his head. But he kept his 
cool, and just said, "Don't stray too far, Kellin. Keep in touch. We 
wouldn't want to lose you." Not a very well veiled threat, but 
subtlety was never Curneth's favourite che'skra hammer.

Two days should be about right, I thought, so I stayed off work the 
next day. The day after, I walked up behind him at the assignment 
board, and said, "Still looking for assignments?"

"There seem to be very few really challenging tasks at present," he 
replied. Nearly the same words; had he forgotten?

"Are you thinking about a career move too?"

Now he looked round at me. "Why, who else is?"

"One of the new recruits, I forget who it was. A small man, dark 
hair." That described nearly half the class. Curneth gave me a strange 
look, and I realised that I hadn't managed to keep the sense of 
triumph out of my voice; but what did it matter? By the time he had a 
minute to think about it, he'd have forgotten all about it. And, 
possibly, all about me; because this time I'd synthesised a version of 
the second pheromone that worked on Ramurans, and had slipped a dose 
of it in Curneth's cup of trah.

Three days later, I saw Curneth in a public walkway. I turned, 
followed him, overtook him and carefully twisted my ankle and fell 
right in front of him. He helped me up, gave me an arm to help me hobble 
over to a bench, then asked me my name and address so he could call me a 
transport. Thirteen years I'd worked with him, and although we weren't 
close friends we'd always had a good working relationship. Now it was 
all gone.



Erasing myself from Ramuran society was more a matter of thoroughness 
than actual difficulty. Family gatherings, class reunions, works 
parties, council meetings - all it took was a couple of hours of 
attendance, a few drops of pheromone in the drinks, and patience. By 
the end of the afternoon I would already see puzzled expressions, and 
hear snatches of questions - "Who's she?" "Was she with you?" "She's 
not staff, is she?" When my own brother asked me to dinner, I almost 
burst out laughing. When my mother sat next to me at a concert and 
looked right through me, I almost cried. The longer it went on, the 
more, I realised, I was giving up for Chakotay. Running away from home 
was simple enough; but this, the slow erosion and destruction of all I 
knew, all I cared about, and the loss of everyone who loved me, was 
almost too much to bear.

Eventually I could find nobody who knew me, nobody to miss me or to 
send out a Tracer after me. It was time for the Tracer virus to be let 
loose on the Tracer databanks. We'd known this might happen some day, 
but the virus was so powerful and so adaptive that even our own 
systems weren't proof against it. It showed, I suppose, how much of 
our society's insularity depended on the consent of its members, and 
especially on the loyalty of the Tracers. We all thought escape was 
impossible, but deep down I think we all wanted to believe it. 
Freedom, as I was learning, can be a heavy burden.

And at last I was free. No record, no memory of my existence anywhere. 
I felt naked and alone, shorn of the basic ties of intelligent life 
forms everywhere; and yet there was an exhilarating sense of power. I 
had my skills, my ship, my weapons and my cloaks; I could go where I 
wanted, be who I wanted, do what I wanted. And I had a trail to follow 
too; that would be an easy transition, a slow introduction to the 
complete freedom I had built myself, through the familiar routines of 
the Tracer.

The Malon know most of what goes on in the clockwise half of the Delta 
Quadrant. It's a long haul to Malon Prime - it took me three months - 
but it was worth the journey. Captain Janeway had, it seemed, been 
able to bend the laws of time and space a remarkable amount. The last 
reports had her passing beyond the limits of Malon space two years 
ago. While I might be able to travel that fast at maximum warp, my 
fuel supply would never last out, and I had no friends anywhere to 
call on for more. There was only one alternative; not a pleasant one, 
but I'd used it before. Hitch a ride from someone faster. There 
weren't too many candidates, and only one was likely to be heading for 
the Alpha Quadrant.



The Borg don't bother us, and we don't bother them. It's voluntary on 
our part, but it's debatable whether they have any choice in the 
matter. The computer scientist who developed the Borg-specific version 
of the Tracer virus has been honoured in the greatest way Ramuran 
society is able; he or she has been Erased, name, family, race and 
even gender completely removed from our records and memories. All we 
know is that the Borg will never look for us and, if they find us, 
will leave and never remember. The Borg virus also keeps us informed 
of its current status; some time the information will stop, and then 
we'll have to be ready. Meanwhile, we can track major Borg cube 
movements, and if necessary follow them, although it takes a cool hand 
on the cloaking modulator controls to keep them unaware of us.

It took a few more months of waiting before a Borg ship was headed the 
right way. I spent most of the time carrying out every piece of 
maintenance I could think of; when I ran out of ideas, I installed a 
backup cloak generator, and made some modifications to the proton 
cannon to give it a multi-adaptive energy modulation scheme, an idea 
I'd got from some of Voyager's Borg data. After I'd finished that, 
things started to turn strange. I was woken one morning by a familiar 
voice, and he was standing by my bunk.

"I've been assigned to talk to you."

He couldn't be here. I must have been working too hard, alone too 
long. "Go away. You're just a figment of my imagination."

He frowned. "If that were true, I'm sure I'd remember."

I shook my head, closed my eyes and waited for him to go away. But he 
didn't, so I tried again. "Look, Chakotay, this isn't real. You're not 
real. I'm just hallucinating."

"You're jumping to conclusions." He certainly looked real, and I 
began to wonder. "I don't mean you any harm. Can you start clearing 
up a few things now?"

I decided to give in. I had an autodoc in the cargo hold, so I could 
treat myself later if I was hallucinating. "Clearing up what? We met, 
we fell in love, now I'm coming to find you again."

"You're not telling the truth. I have no memory of meeting you. You 
might remember a relationship between us, but it didn't exist."

There it was, the one thing I'd feared all along. Maybe I could find 
him, and maybe I could convince him to take me back; but if I 
couldn't, what then? I began to realise how completely I'd severed my 
ties with Ramura. "I'm going to the Alpha Quadrant, Chakotay. I'm 
going to find you."

"Wrong direction. Don't go."

"What do you mean?" I was afraid now, afraid of losing him before I'd 
even started to look. 

"I just want to make it clear how I feel. I don't want to play this 
game."

I felt desperate now. "Then what can I do? Go back to Ramura?"

"They aren't going to be able to take you back."

"Chakotay, stop it," I pleaded. "Just give me a chance to think."

"Fine. I'm listening."

I took some deep breaths, and centred myself. "It's my decision, my 
life. I'm coming to find you, Chakotay."

"On my ship, I give the orders. But I'm going to try to do more than 
that."

His ship? But this was my ship. Something didn't make sense, and at 
last I realised what it was. "Chakotay, tell me about Voyager."

"We've met people with ships that are faster and more powerful. But 
Voyager's always managed to be a match for the best of them."

"Has it got ice cream?" 

Remembering now, I mouthed the words as he spoke them: "I'm surprised 
you didn't have any the last time you were here." There must be a 
problem with the memories I'd recovered from the neurolytic emitter. 
Instead of staying sensibly in long term memory, they were intruding 
on my perceptions. I could overcome that simply enough. It could wait, 
though; I'd laboured so long in anticipation, I needed at least the 
illusion of time with him.

I smiled, at last, and relaxed. "Let's have some now, shall we?"

"I thought you might like to get something to eat--unless your 
memories of our mess hall aren't good." 

"Can I have your pudding?"

"Gladly."

And then, just when it was getting to be fun, the comms terminal alarm 
sounded.



A Borg scout sphere was heading for the Beta Quadrant, destination a 
planet called Romulus, mission - not difficult to guess. The small 
spheres were for scouting, but the cubes tended to follow before long.
In another time I'd have simply tagged along, Traced my assignment and 
watched. Somehow, though, I felt that Chakotay would have found a way 
to do more, to safeguard these neighbours of the Federation. For all I 
knew, Romulus could be the finest flower of Beta Quadrant 
civilisation, a centre for arts, sciences and humanities, an exemplar 
of the heights a liberal, egalitarian state could reach. It probably 
wasn't, but it probably didn't deserve to vanish from history. Even a 
Borg scout was far too much for me to contemplate taking on alone, of 
course, but I realised I could give Romulus a fighting chance.

I matched directions with the sphere's flight plan, activated my cloak 
and worked my ship up to warp factor eight. My sensors quickly 
detected the transwarp conduit, and as the sphere flashed by, I 
slipped in, unseen, behind it. Then, during the days that followed, I 
patched into the modified Tracer virus in the Borg computers and 
executed a simple command.

Eventually, the conduit terminated, and the Borg scout sphere, with my 
small ship unseen behind it, emerged into normal space to a warm 
Romulan welcome. For the past two weeks the Borg had been broadcasting 
on all subspace bands at maximum strength, and the message was simple: 
We are coming to destroy you. The most peaceful society would have had 
to react in some way, and from the forces the Romulans had been able 
to muster I suspected that peace wasn't their favourite che'skra 
hammer. Their ships were huge, green, and powerful, and I was glad 
they couldn't see me because they didn't seem to be in the right mood 
to quibble over who was or wasn't a friend. I left what looked like 
the battle to end all battles behind me, and ran for the Federation.



There's really not much to say about the initial stages of Tracing, 
especially when the assignment is on a civilised world. There are 
slow, tedious months of surveillance, learning to understand a new 
culture enough to find its information sources. There are equally 
tedious weeks of hacking into databases, studying public records, 
viewing old newsvids, or accessing whatever other records may be 
available. The people I'm looking for tend to be noticeable in a 
crowd, even if they do get forgotten instantly, so there's generally 
some trace to follow. With Chakotay it was easier than usual, because 
people remembered him; but there was the added complication that he 
clearly didn't want to be tracked down.

I found him, at last, on a Federation colony world called Dorvan, a 
rich, lush, forested planet close to the remains of the Cardassian 
Union. Pacifico El Guerrero, as his colleagues on the ruling council 
now called him - from what he'd told me, I could understand why he'd 
want to conceal his past - lived on a hunting reserve not far from 
Dorvan City. After extracting all I needed from the Dorvan data 
archives - fully cloaked, of course - I resolved to take a long walk.
As I approached his house, I saw him, apparently digging over a small 
patch of ground nearby. He was older, of course, with a touch of grey 
around his temples, and rough brown trousers and a light tan shirt had 
replaced his red and black uniform, but I recognised him at once. The 
sadness in his eyes, though, was something I hadn't expected to see, 
and so I took a closer look before revealing myself.

Rites and customs for disposal of the dead vary enormously from 
culture to culture, but we Ramurans don't know much about other 
cultures. It always seemed natural that any physical evidence of 
anyone's existence should be destroyed as completely as possible after 
their death - why leave clues for an enemy to follow? - but apparently 
humans cherished their corpses, buried them in special places and 
marked the places where they lay with decorative slabs of rock. This 
one was less decorated than most, bearing only the single word, 
"Kathryn". A woman's name, and one that meant a great deal to him.

I didn't know who Kathryn might have been, but I felt that Chakotay 
needed me now as much as I needed him. I'd planned to take things 
slowly, to build myself an identity here on Dorvan, then to get to 
know him slowly. That would have been safe. But I've never been afraid 
to take risks when it mattered, and here and now nothing mattered more 
than Chakotay. I made sure, at least, that I was standing behind him, 
and then I dropped my cloak, stepped forward, and laid a hand on his 
shoulder.

He barely noticed at first, deep in grief. Maybe he thought I was 
somebody else. Then he spoke, and the tone of his voice made me want 
to hold him and comfort him and take away the pain.

"It killed her in the end. It would have killed anyone, seven years of 
hell like that." He shook slightly, stifling a sob. "I think she was 
already dead inside the day we got home. It's just taken a few years 
for her body to catch up."

"I'm sorry, Chakotay," I answered softly. "Is there anything I can..."

He spun round suddenly, rose to his feet and grabbed both my shoulders 
roughly. "Chakotay? Nobody's called me that for years, except..." He 
looked deep into my eyes, puzzled yet intrigued, and his grip on my 
arms relaxed. "Do I know you?"

At last, I could play it all out again. "We've met before."

He laughed bitterly. "If that were true, I'm sure I'd..."

I could see his expression change, and then with a brief "Wait here!" 
he was running into the house. Emerging, moments later, with a small 
black rectangular object with a strange opalescent sheen to it. He 
opened it up, and revealed a sheaf of thin wafers of material, covered 
with writing. "Say something. Anything. Just... talk to me."

"I've come a long way to find you, Chakotay," I began. Then my sense 
of humour stepped in to help. "And ice cream, of course. I'd go half 
way across the galaxy for that alone."

"Kellin." My heart leapt into my throat as he said my name. "It is 
you. Your hair, your face," he tilted his head to one side, "your 
ears, your voice... it's all here, even if I couldn't remember." He 
showed me the writing on one of the sheets. "Something your viruses 
couldn't erase."

"Oh, I don't know." I couldn't resist smiling. "Some kind of bio-
engineered nanostructure with pigment altering properties..." But his 
attention was wandering, back from me to the slab of rock and the 
single name on it.

I followed his gaze. I didn't dare ask who she'd been, but I managed
to ask the question I'd been dreading. "Did you love her?"

He didn't look round. "I don't really know. Maybe I'll never really 
know. But she needed me, and sometimes I was all she had. I had to be 
there for her, just because she needed me. And I was, right to the 
end."

Only then did my memories of him come fully back to life, completed by 
the understanding of what sort of man I had fallen in love with. I 
heard myself saying, gently, "You're such a kind person."

Then he looked at me again, with more life in his eyes, and a touch of 
surprise and disbelief. "You said that before. I remember!"

"You remember me? That's not possible."

"I remember. You said it twice."

I shrugged, and grinned. "I guess originality's not exactly my 
favourite che'skra hammer."

He smiled then, a deep, genuine, loving smile, and at last I knew it 
would all be right. He'd forgotten me the first time, and I'd 
forgotten him the second, but there's an old saying: the third time is 
the charm.

"Your favourite what?"

"Che'skra hammer. Surely I must have told you how to play che'skra?"

He reached out for me, and I was in his arms at last, and revelling in 
the sound of his voice as he gently replied,

"I must have forgotten."


THE END