Seeking the Answers

[MajorZStarDust 0]

Shore leave just wasn't the same anymore. Especially on a pleasure planet. There was a time when Ziggy could have given himself over to the opportunities abounding on such a place, but no longer. Beaches weren't the same without Sammy. Bungalows were too romantic to sleep in alone. What fun was there on a pleasure planet if you had noone special to enjoy it with?

 

That wasn't all. For months it had been weighing on him that he knew Marty was alive, but hadn't told Dana. When the memories had come back they had been fuzzy and unclear. In all his reports about his kidnapping he had stated that Marty had been killed, to encourage Ziggys cooperation, but now he knew that it had been a ruse. He remembered Marty being barely alive, left behind when they took Thomas Riker.

 

The mind control he had been under had played with his memories, and even when he did remember that Marty was alive, it was a long time before he could believe it was true, and not just some false imagining. The guilt he had carried for so long was not eased by the fact Marty was alive, it was heavier. Marty was his best friend. But more than that, Marty had been Dana's lover, had wanted to marry her. Yet what had Ziggy done with that friendship but stomp all over it by taking advantage of Dana when they had had too much to drink and fathering her child. It should have been Marty's, not his. At least he had an excuse for not telling her Kelly was alive, he had been ordered not to. Sometimes it felt like it had all happened so long ago, and other times it seemed like yesterday.

 

As time went on, he pushed the memories away, knowing that the time wasn't right to make a rescue. And then he had gotten comfortable, complacent, content. So what if Dana hadn't married him? She loved Marty, but she had turned him down too. They were still friends, and she was wonderful about sharing Michael with him. And of course there was Michael himself. Ziggy loved his son, and didn't want to think of the guilt involved in his conception.

 

When the Vogart had *possesed* him, Ziggy had come away with the knowledge that it was all different now. He couldn't ignore the memories, and if they hadn't put the Arcadia in a position to find out what he needed to know, he would have approached Moose. Orders may have been orders, but this Moose wasn't the Moose he had been ordered not to talk to.

 

Miren IV had long tried to lure some of Risa's lucrative tourist business. It's remote location had not helped, as it had been hoped. And while most people were willing to look past slave labor, others were not. Ziggy had known about the planet, known it had slaves, but hadn't known the connection til now. It was the one piece of information the Vogarts had made sure he remembered.. everything else of his possession was forgotten. He had come to on the Arcadia with one thought in his head.

 

"You will find the answers you seek here."

 

It seemed simple, but the memory wasn't just a phrase. Vogarts saw things on many levels, and the simple phrase ran through his head with memories attached. Kelly standing on the knoll overlooking the ranch, Marty laughing on an away mission, the jumbled rescue, Sam face entertwined with that of her cousins. Images of slavery.

 

"You will find the answers you seek here."

 

Ziggy knew that Miren was just the starting point. The slaves here came from somewhere... someone.. else. Once they found who, they could find where Or vice versa.

 

If only he could mke them see....