"Star-Date 2501.09…" Captain Janeway reported in her log. "Voyager is on its way to DS-9 for a rendezvous with the Enterprise for briefings and research to combine our comparative histories with the Delta Quadrant. I have not seen Jean-Luc in some time. I will be very interested in sharing with him what I have learned from my experiences away from home with his brief experiences when his crew was within the quadrant. I'm sure he will have many questions." She was soon at the helm with all the usual faces. Tom Paris was at ops as well as Harry Kim controlling the helm. Chakotay was by her side as usual. Tuvok checked and monitored the sensors beyond the ship. It was pretty much the same mix of Maquis and Starfleet personnel that was present as they tried to reach home from that unexplored region of space with one exception… their new ship's doctor. Upon return to the Alpha Quadrant, they were assigned a new Chief Medical Officer to completely fill their crew quota. A bit slight on size with a thin hairline, Dr. Daniel Collins was a bit quirky, soft-spoken and non-confrontational, but he was an experienced officer just having completed a tour of duty on the Nomad and a partial commitment on the Griffin. He turned up on the bridge quietly concerned, nervously wandering toward the Captain and cleared his throat to get her attention.
"Yes, doctor…"
"Captain…" Dr. Collins spoke a bit concerned. "When I was assigned to your ship, my main duty in addition to being the ship's new doctor was to conduct physicals on everyone in the crew to see if they were ready to return to Starfleet since being lost in the Delta Quadrant. However, there is one member of the crew who has not yet had their physical."
"Ridiculous…" Janeway signed a pad handed to her by an ensign and turned to look back to the doctor. "No one is exempt from a mandatory physical. Take a security team and get this person to sickbay. I won't have this on my ship. Who is this person?"
"Well…" Collins nervously cleared his throat. "You are that person."
"What?" Janeway reacted with disbelief. Chakotay tried to hide a grin and both Harry and Tom looked back to her except to Captain Janeway snap her fingers at them to return to their posts. Tuvok watched with concerned interest. "Look, doctor, I have been very busy. Meetings, orientations, briefings… Starfleet needed a full rundown of our activities while we were away. We was required a full briefing of what happened in Starfleet since our disappearance. I'm… I'm heading to another briefing."
"And then they'll be another briefing, and then a mission and then another briefing…" Dr. Collins reacted completely respectful but interested in her welfare. "As you said… no one is exempt from a mandatory physical."
"Captain…" Chakotay rose from his seat. "I can take the bridge as you take your physical."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Chakotay…." Janeway responded a bit irked and embarrassed before sighing.
"If the mountain won't come to Mohammed…" Dr. Collins responded with part of the famous idiom.
"Fine, let's get this over with…" Janeway groaned with frustration. "Number One, you have the bridge…"
"Yes, Captain…" Chakotay remained standing as the good doctor followed his captain. He looked back at them as Tom and Harry shared an amused grin. The bridge staff continued sharing looks and stifled chuckles as Chakotay took the captain's chair. "Stay on our present course."
"Commander…" Tom spoke up. "I'm been picking up this visual anomaly in our charts." He revealed the differences on the screen. "There should be eight stars in that void on our bearing, but they're not there now and Starfleet has no record of anything occurring in the vicinity."
"Stars just don't vanish…" Chakotay responded. "Send a probe to get a closer look."
"Sending probe…" Tuvok sent a sensor probe to get a reading of the void. The device fired from the ship and headed straight along its trajectory as a light vanishing into the darkness between stars. Crew waited for the device to start sending back telemetry, but as they waited they watched as the darkness seemed to open up as an interstellar flower of cosmic energies in black, dark blue and dull gray.
"It appears to be the collapsed end of a wormhole… perhaps a juvenile black hole." Tuvok read. "The gravitational readings are unstable…" The ship despite its distance shuddered. "I am adjusting speed to steer clear of it." With that attempt, the ship lurched even more. Whatever it was, it caught them and was pulling them in.
"Is it just me or does this seem oddly familiar!" Tom mumbled as he tried to adjust their helm.
"It seems to be some sort of rip in the space-time continuum…" Tuvok was getting multiple readings. "The probe must have activated it into opening and latching on to us. I am trying to compensate." Voyager was starting to lurch and rattle as they tried to break free. The helm tried to stay on course but then the ship's nacelles were caught in the interstellar trap and the massive craft was being pulled backwards like a child struggling to hold on to his favorite toy. In the engine room, Bel'anna Torres rushed to get more power to the engines.
"Bel'anna… we need more power!"
"I was right in the middle of a diagnostics test!" The half Klingon beauty rushed to get the engine back up to full power. "Did we really need to go sticking our head into a wormhole right now?"
"Try directing a phaser blast in front of us…" Chakotay had an idea. "Maybe we can blast ourselves free!" He looked back to Ops and his half-Vulcan security chief, but as he turned round, it was not Tuvok but Harry Kim looking at him.
"Weapons unresponsive…" Harry responded at ops. "Telemetry off-line. " He looked back up, but where Chakotay should have been, Captain Janeway stood instead. The bridge had become brighter. Some of the crew was intact, a few new faces appeared as reality changed and history rewrote itself. Something in their history had been altered, but one thing remained the same… Voyager was getting pulled through a particularly violent black hole and was getting rattled apart in the process. Bel'anna was electrocuted badly in engineering and in Ten Forward, Kes of the Ocampan race was tossed over a table into the arms of a waiting crew member who took the opportunity to gaze across her body on his. Voyager turned violently on its side then corrected itself as it leveled off. Janeway was knocked from her seat and hurled toward the diagnostics area ready to be incredibly injured, but something grabbed her and she stopped in mid air, held aloft by powerful psychic energies that saved her life and saved the computer bay. As the ship corrected itself and passed out of the expanse, she placed her feet down and caught her breath.
"Thank you, Number One."
"Yes, captain…" They had a new First Officer in this reality. Tall and good-looking with a youthful beard of blonde hair and bright blue eyes, Commander Luke Skywalker was one of the finest officers in Starfleet. A former bush pilot from the Tatoo star-system in the Orion constellation, he had served well as a good fighter pilot, advancing quickly through the ranks of Starfleet to join the crew of Voyager, beating out Geordi LaForge and Nicholas Uchtman for the stellar position. He was also very adept in the religion of the Jedi Knights, a secret society that existed back to Nineteenth Century Earth. His psychic awareness and psychokinetic power made him Janeway's most adept crewmembers.
"Harry," Luke helped Kathryn to her seat. "Any readings on what we passed through?" He joined his officer at ops.
"Not yet, commander…" Harry did not sense the difference in the universe or the crew. "Cursory indications pointed to a collapsed wormhole that had reopened, but it may also have been a rip in hyperspace. There is some evidence by our bearings that we may have experienced a rip in the time-space continuum. I am reading that we are now five light years off the Serling Expanse near Cassiopeian space."
"Leave a marker for Starfleet to avoid the area." Janeway composed herself. "File a report and run a check of the ship's systems. I also want Bel'anna to run a complete diagnostics for any damage to the ship. Hopefully, we just got off very lucky from what could have been a very nasty incident…"