Reality rarely provides the picture a mind's eye paints of the moment a life-long goal is achieved, reached or otherwise stumbled upon. A single hope held against the odds; facing impossible threats and an infinitesimal chance of success which nonetheless provides enough food for the soul to avoid the march to starvation, and the death of a reason to live.
Still when a person - or group of people - come to the realisation that their dreams were disassociated from the reality they imagined, one of two decisions could be made.
The first is despair – a terrible loss that undoes all the good work hope had carried out in keeping the will to survive first and foremost. Some could not deal with the truth that had been hidden by blind optimism and fell into darkness and depression.
Others came to realise that by surviving long enough to see their dream – even a dream of sorts – come to pass was a victory in itself. That to face implacable foes and terrible odds and emerge wiser, stronger and more determined to succeed than ever could be viewed as a failure only by gods among men, or men bereft of any common sense to offer.
Reality did not provide the picture the crew of the Federation Starfleet ship Voyager had painted with their collective minds' eye. One hundred and forty six people had spent almost ten years traversing the wilderness space of the Delta Quadrant – flung an impossible distance by impossible energies, at the command of an impossibly advanced race. Friends had died and loved ones lost, to the gulf of the void and the incessant march of time.
The collective dream of a return to familiar surroundings – where the final frontier was within ten thousand light years of home, remained burning and strong in the hearts and minds of virtually every crewman on board from Captain to Ensign and the enlisted beneath. A hundred nights' sleep given over to dreams of grandiose returns and lavish receptions abounded; where the crew would be recognised for their incredible adventure and sacrifice, where Starfleet would laud them as the greatest examples of all the Federation stood for.
The small band of desk-bound Admirals representing such vital, if underwhelming, fields as The Core of Engineers, United Earth Affairs and Chief of the Federation President's Staff who shuffled on-board the Intrepid-Class starship to serve as the official "Welcome Home Envoy" could scarcely have been a harsher shattering of the dream.
The specific hope of the ship's Captain to set her hardy little starship down in the expansive plaza of Starfleet Academy was replaced by a mooring at Utopia Planetia Fleet Yards, Mars. The more realistic desire of the hardy little starship's photonic Chief of Medicine, to attend a dozen cocktail parties and practice his much-vaunted social skills, were eleven parties too far.
The only official affair was a dour meet-and-greet where young up-and-coming officers sat dutifully and patiently, but not truly participatory, while listening to increasingly unsure members of Voyager's crew recite adventures rapidly becoming as distant to the people listening as the journey of the ship itself.
Citations and medals were dolled out in-person speedily to the one hundred and forty four souls who survived to reach Federation Space, as well as honorary mentions and moments of silence for the dozen who had fallen along the way.
As quickly as the News Networks and Starfleet Recreation Lounges the quadrant-across had championed the story, their appetites changed and Voyager entered the history books, literally, years before anyone could have guessed.
This was not some alternative dimension – inhabited by familiar faces, races and worlds given a strange and disturbing skew. This was not an alternative history where some vital event had been changed in some barely-perceptible way. This was simply the natural evolution of a society after the frank and harrowing horror of the war with the Dominion, and its allies.
Thousands of starships, starbases and planetary colonies destroyed. Millions of officers, enlisted and civilians killed with triple that number wounded so severely that their service to Starfleet, the Federation or even simply their families was at an end. The precious mineral wealth of entire worlds scoured form the bedrock hurriedly; the normally painstaking process of precautions to safe-guard life eschewed for fear that the mighty yards at Antares, Utopia Planetia, McKinley Station or a dozen others would grind to a halt without the vital raw materials to make new war.
The only Amendment to the Founding Charter of the United Federation of Planets to be made in a time of active war – the formal suspension of the Prime Directive for all member worlds and their defence forces for perpetuity.
The dead had been buried and their graves grown cold and hard by the time Voyager arrived home. The Domnion-scarred silver hulls of Galaxy, Excelsior, Sovereign, Defiant and Miranda-class starships repaired or if beyond such, scrapped. The restoration of the Prime Directive and the painfully, agonizingly slow readjustment of a galactic economy from a footing of total war back to an attempt at recapturing happier, more uplifting centuries.
Voyager was a Starfleet ship. She represented the best and brightest of the Starfleet and her reappearance was as welcome as an eldest child come home, surprisingly, one Christmas where before there had been the expectation of an apology and a cancellation, or simply an empty seat at the table.
The fact of reality, hard as it was, remained that Voyager was one ship. Compared to veritable floating cities such as the Galaxy-Class she carried a mere one hundred fifty souls. More rivalling the archaic Miranda and ageing Excelsior-classes than the front-line units of the modern era for displacement. The billions upon billions of Federation citizens were pleased – captivated even – by a simple against-the-odds tale of survival. As any war-weary populace was prone to do they seized on the message and held it close to their hearts as inspiration.
They soon found other comforts, as a war-weary populace was prone to do.
After the short, sharp reception only two further pieces of official news made any real mention of Voyager or her crew. The first, much expected, was the issuance of an immediate and complete blanket pardon for all former Macquis crew members and the immediate offer of a full reinstatement at current rank alongside accrued time served in the field.
The second piece of news shattered the simplest hope amongst the crew – that of the Vulcan Chief of Security, Commander Tuvok, that the crew would find new challenges with their ship plying the more familiar, if equally challenging spacelanes of home.
An interim report filed by the Starfleet Core of Engineers had paid tribute to the tireless work of the ship's engineering staff. Highlighting the contributions of Lieutenant Joe Carey and specifically holding up the Chief Engineer, Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres, as a shining example of the embodiment of the Core's "Can-do, Must-do" pioneering spirit.
The diminutive engineer had been inundated with transfer offers to a four-dozen ships in the Starfleet within three weeks of the report's publishing. Nonetheless the majority of what was contained in the report had made those offers dull and chafing.
The near-decade spent in the wilderness of the Delta-Quadrant aside, Voyager was by no means a young ship. Launched in 2371, following the successful deep-space trials of the ship given its name by the class, the USS Intrepid, the ship had pioneered many advanced technologies including bio-neural gelpacks replacing a large percentage of the standard-of-the-day, Isolinear data chips and variable-fold warp engine geometry.
By the time of the ship's return in 2382 these technologies were not only standard but vastly expanded on front-line units. Bio-neural gelpacks now made up the entirety of primary computing power on the Resolute, Invincible and Ticonderoga-class starships while folding geometry warp engines had been replicated as early as the Sovereign-class, without the need for complicated, expensive nacelle strut construction and maintenance.
While venerable Miranda and Excelsior-class ships continued to ply the stars without much more than token upgrades, these types were workhorses – perfect for investigating nebulas or ferrying mid-level diplomats across the Federation and flying the flag to allied systems of nominal importance. The Intrepid-class had been designed as a deep-space tactical platform; a fast and nimble ship capable of carrying out extended operations, while making use of advanced technologies to increase automation.
While the ship had proved – beyond a doubt or the shadow of one – that it could operate for vastly-extended periods of time, it was nonetheless outdated. Worse still, it was so specialised in its original role that it could not easily be reassigned another which justified the upkeep of a particularly labour-intensive class over a cheap workhorse, such as the Excelsior.
The final nail in the coffin came in the form of an addendum to the Core of Engineering report, carrying with it the results of the complete analysis of Voyager from bowplate to aft tractor emitter and everywhere between. A decade spent operating without any more thorough an overhaul than whatever components the ship's engineers could physically remove from the bulkheads, left manufacturer's guidelines torn up and vented into space.
Systems and sub-assemblies had smashed through their cycle limits a hundred-fold and made repair frightfully difficult and complex. Voyager's warp engines alone had accrued a staggering 64,512 hours of use, compared to the recommended maximum cycle allowance for an Intrepid-class starship between engine refits and major overhauls of 3672.
The structure of Voyager made for equally grim reading. Having survived punishing alien assaults for year upon year, and making do with repairs fabricated from replicator patches spliced with native metals alloyed as best as could be managed on-board or at the surface of a passing world, the skin of the starship had changed so completely in composition that the Core of Engineering found it impossible to reference its own structural guidebooks written specifically for the Intrepid-class.
Without such assurances, only vague guesses could be made to the state of the vital support frame underneath which the entirety of the starship rested and relied upon. Combined with other lesser concerns revolving round outdated core technologies which were difficult to remove and expensive to replace, such as the phaser emitters and bio-neural network systems, there could be no other logical decision.
On the 14th of October 2383, the civilian Secretary of Starfleet acting on the counsel and suggestion of the Chief of Starfleet Operations officially struck the USS Voyager from the (somewhat antiquated named) Naval Register.
At that time the Intrepid-class starship ceased to be a Starfleet vessel.
On the 22nd of October, Voyager minus her USS prefix and much to the chagrin of her auburn-haired first – and only – Captain, was towed from Utopia Planetia by tractor beam to the Inactive Starship Facility (Western Spiral Arm). Denied the chance to at least travel there under her own power by health and safety laws, which had conspired to revoke the ship's Faster-Than-Light Operating License , Voyager was stripped of technology deemed sensitive to Starfleet interests and mothballed.
She was unfit even for twilight duty on the Reserve Warship Register – a list of outdated or obsolete vessels which nonetheless could in a time of total war, as was seen by the terrible battles with the Dominion and which inspired such a system, serve a tactical purpose.
She was left in orbit to await a civilian buyer or breaker who never came. Left with only enough technology and functional systems to allow her RCS thrusters to be fired remotely to maintain a parking orbit, the former USS Voyager is but one of the many once-shining Starfleet ships that carried the delta-shaped chevron so proudly, now making up the numbers of Salvage Yard Zero-Six-Five.
...
...
B'Elanna wrinkled her nose as she scratched a fingernail across the frost laying upon the surface of the computer console; a hint of Starfleet-black plexiglass appearing through the blanket of white. She suppressed the urge to shiver, watching her breath as it condensed instantly in the chilly air and billowed up and around the expanse of the engine room.
The artificially-warmed soles of her insulated boots cracked softly against the cold deck-plating, Trying in vain to keep hold of the warmth as it tracked ever closer to the colossal cylinder passing through both levels and separated from the rest of the section by a red, circular handrail. Tugging the fur-lined hood back to expose her ridges to the chill, a small toothy grin nonetheless spread as she ducked underneath the rail.
Pulling the final glove from her hand, she flexed her fingers and placed them against the outer duranium casing of the warp core. Her forehead followed until it pushed against the cold metal.
"Is it the same as you remembered?" A voice asked matter-of-factly.
B'Elanna nodded, her smile wide. "Better ..." She mumbled, eyes squeezed closed. "Feels just like home."
Although the Klingon could no more see behind herself than possess the extra eyes to do so, Seven of Nine raised her ocular implant questioningly regardless. Her lips opened to rebuke the Commander but thought better for it – six years together and three married as Beloved and Wife had taught the blonde much as far as tact went.
Drawing her head back, B'Elanna planted a quick kiss against the duranium and turned back towards her significant other. Leaning forward over the handrail, she cocked her head to the side in perfect mockery of the lanky woman opposite.
"Do you want one too?" She asked innocently enough.
Seven smirked, leaning forward to capture a pair of soft lips with her own. They brushed together, the moment extending to moments until the kiss became something more. A metal-banded hand – far warmer than the similar material surrounding – cupped the small of B'Elanna's back, eliciting a growl of approval.
"Admiral on the deck!" A voice roared with all the authority of a court martial. Seven did not move – her auditory processor instantly identifying the owner and understanding the intent of the joke. In a rare moment of opposites where opposites were usually found, B'Elanna instinctively snapped upwards and almost drove her ridges into the underside of the blonde's chin.
She jerked backwards to avoid the impact, her back clanging against the warp core with a dull thud. Brown eyes urgently sought out the Admiral and found her – wearing wry grin and clutching a small rectangle covered in a simple coloured wrap. "Admiral Janeway ..." B'Elanna almost pouted in greeting.
"Commander Torres!" Kathryn beamed, setting her package down on the deck and extending her arms outwards. "I order you to present yourself and your wife for inspection and possible hugging. On the bounce, Commander!"
B'Elanna flashed a grin, running a hand through her shoulder-length, braided brown locks and ducking underneath the handrail. "Admiral Janeway," She began pompously. "May I present my beautiful, wonderful, apparently ageless wife! Seven of Nine, this is Admiral Kathryn Janeway, Admiral, this is--"
"Seven of Nine," The blonde interrupted, rolling her cobalt eyes. B'Elanna's mock-seriousness turned to pretend-suspicion and needlessly dramatic paranoia. "You two have met?"
Lacking the two hearts and fierce metabolism of the Klingon, or the biomechanical augments of the former Borg Drone and so perhaps feeling her age more than most assembled, Kathryn nonetheless stepped forward and enveloped the pair in a hug made all the more impressive for a woman renowned across the Federation for her tenacity and isolation in command.
"Where's Mister Janeway?" Torres asked as she leaned back against the handrail. "Still parking the shuttle?"
"Chakotay's in the messhall, making sure the heaters we brought along are thawing the seat cushions. He should be starting on the salad in about ten minutes – I hope you've all brought your appetites back to the Alpha Quadrant."
"You say that every year, Admiral," Seven puzzled – having learned many new and wonderful things in the years spent as B'Elanna's beloved but not having yet grasped the intricacies of formality in informal settings. "And every year my Be'nal replies with--"
"Hope you brought enough salad then," The Klingon interrupted joyfully, delivering her line. "'Cause when Tom and Harry arrive we'll be lucky if they leave the deck we're sitting on. Hell I don't even know why Harry packs it in like he does – Nicoletti was a legend whenever she could wrestle the soup ladle away from Neelix."
"Too much of a good thing can be bad for you," Seven summarised, nodding her chin in agreement with herself. B'Elanna snatched up a meshed hand and squeezed the alabaster flesh inside her caramel fingers.
"Everything in moderation my dear," She assured. "We can stop when we're dead."
Janeway threw her hands up in mock-surrender, shaking her head with a smile. "Okay you two, let's head up to Deck Two before I'm treated to the sight of you two, mostly naked, doing it at lightspeed underneath a plasma conduit. Again."
"I was not aware you possessed an eidetic memory too, Admiral," Seven replied utterly without shame. I would not expect you to recall that so easily."
"Recall it?" Kathryn repeated with disbelief. I don't think death itself to strip the image from my retinas. Still, this is my ship and as far as I am concerned, while we're on Voyager my word is still law ..."
"And my word is : Deck Two, right now, Commander. Bring that smartass wife of yours along too."
...
...
Time travel had long been proven possible. History was being re-written from as early a period in Starfleet's experience as the original NX-class Enterprise, and even earlier by aliens operating amongst a pre-warp Human Race. In the future, Starfleet would operate actual timeships that would slip between the centuries and years as easily as conventional starships journey between stars and worlds.
In the meantime however, time travel of a sort had been achieved on Deck Two of the former USS Voyager, orbiting Salvage Yard Zero-Six-Five of the Inactive Starship Facility somewhere in the Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Glass clinked together, laughter reverberated around the empty mess hall, and the sound of conversation gave a new life to a tired, cold ship in the very last years of her noble life.
"As I remember it Mister Kim," Tuvok countered, showing not a single wrinkle to suggest the passage of a decade, "You did not ever defeat me at chess. You are mistaken."
Harry shook his head vehemently, his lips crashing together as he devoured more green leaves and peppers. "No way Captain, with the greatest due respect I think you've gotten too used to always being seen as right in front of your crew."
"I am always right, in front of my crew or in front of you," The Vulcan corrected as he sipped from his glass. "You are still incorrect. You have never defeated me in that game, Lieutenant."
Harry nodded in defeat, concentrating his efforts on eating.
Tom Paris resisted the urge to cuff his best friend around the back of the head, settling instead for a proposed toast. "Now we've gotten that vital topic of discussion out of the way, I propose we raise a glass to Chakotay's new appointment as Federation Ambassador to the Cardassian Union!"
"Cardassian Solidarity," The grey-haired Captain corrected with a smile. "I think the hardest change is the fact nobody's going to call me sir anymore."
"You will still be entitled to that priviledge," Seven corrected in turn. "Your rank of Captain will apply post-retirement to all officers currently underneath that position in the chain of command."
The blonde gave no indication of a joke until the slightest pause between sentences. "Which means you will be required to refer to your wife as Ma'am for the rest of your life – whether she is on active-duty or not."
Chakotay laughed long and hard, "I'll raise a glass to that!"
"Here here!" The Doctor chorused, subconsciously playing with the rod of asclepius pinned to his tunic which represented the office of Deputy Chief of Starfleet Medical. Catching the not-so-subtle hint, Tom did not miss a beat in extending the toast; "And to the Doctor's promotion! May he find a new peon to work to death in an even bigger sickbay!"
"If you'd worked harder, Mister Paris, you could have made Floor Nurse."
Tom gulped his glass down and grinned, slapping the EMH on the back and shaking his head in laughter. "Speaking of people who work hard – Joe; what the hell are you doing on the Bellarophen?"
The red-haired "Gentleman of Deck Fifteen" shrugged his shoulders and offered a small smile. "With B'Elanna heading up a Fleet taskforce at the Core of Engineering, and with Seven busy leading the Theoretical Propulsion Group at Utopia Planetia, I'm the last line-engineer who knows the Intrepid-class inside-out."
"Last qualified grease monkey, huh?" Tom quipped. "Now that B'Elanna's got herself an office and a shuttle and Seven's re-writing everything we ever knew about Warp Theory but were afraid to ask. Twice."
Carey nodded, "The Bellarophen's a good ship. I'm not really interested in anything other than getting my hands dirty out in the big black."
"I'd be out in the big black if a certain-someone hadn't convinced me I wasn't "Utilising my talents in the most beneficial manner relevant to my available resources ..."
"You were not," Seven reassured. "You will be Chief of the Starfleet Core of Engineering within eighteen months by my projections."
"B'Elanna nodded, secretly pleased not simply by the faith her beloved showed in her, but the new-found faith she had found in herself through the back-breaking work of keeping this ship, Voyager, intact for almost a decade through some of the most hostile space imaginable. Still she could not actually show it, and allow Seven to see she was right. That would be unbearable.
"Yes dear," The Klingon grumbled, sinking into her chair and folding her arms.
"I would like to propose a toast," Tuvok announced with the creak of a chair pushed back to allow him to stand. "I would like to propose a toast to this ship and all that it has stood for, and will continue to stand for in our hearts and minds.
"I propose a toast so that we might remember how this ship has kept us safe from harm, and carried us seventy thousand light years so quickly that for some of us, the Alpha Quadrant had barely adjusted to our departure."
Harry mouthed something incomprehensible as he struggle to finish his mouthful of salad, Tuvok's gaze falling on him at the reference and leaving Lieutenant Kim in no doubt as to the intention. "My parents missed me ..." He replied with a wink.
Fishing underneath the table for her package, Kathryn pulled it onto the table and slowly began to unwrap it – tugging away at the tape securing the coloured fabric closed. Scrunching the cover into a ball and dropping it to the decking, the Admiral carefully – reverently – set the ship's dedication plate down on the lip of a bay window looking out into the billion-plus twinkling points of light that made up the stars of the greater galaxy and galaxies beyond.
In the same place she placed it every year, on this December 25th. The symbolism of rebirth – of a new coming, or perhaps a new twist for an old tale told before that was undeniable. Kathryn's eyes traced the ship's motto, her lips bringing the words to life.
"For I dipt in to the future, far as human eye could see; Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be..."
"To Voyager!" Chakotay enthused, "The ship that took us to the final frontier, and back."
"To Voyager!" The staff chorused.
B'Elanna dropped her head to the side, letting it rest against the strong shoulders of her beloved. Pale fingers entwined with their tanned counterparts, and the pair rested their eyes on the dedication plate sitting proudly ahead.
"She was a prudent ship," Seven conceded in as close to vulnerability as she could manage in public.
B'Elanna nodded, laying a hand on the table which itself stood bolted to the decking. "She brought us together, and she got us home. We owe a lot to this ship. That's why we've done this every year since her decommissioning, and that's why we'll do it every year until the last one who remembers passes on to Kahless."
"Death cannot make me forget this this ship," Seven affirmed in as much a matter-of-fact as a challenge to the Reaper himself to attempt to do so. B'Elanna turned her head, drawing in a lungful of air, tinged with the faint aroma of cascading blonde locks.
If Voyager had ears, it would listen to the kind words and draw solace that it was not forgotten here, amongst the corroding, empty hulls of its kin. If Voyager had a voice it would tell of all it had seen – the fantastical worlds it had flew over and landed upon, and the myriad peoples who had walked its halls.
If Voyager had a heart, it would beat with the honesty of a life spent in total devotion to others.
The closest things to ears, a voice and a heart were gone. Sensors removed, the computer core disconnected and the warp core de-fuelled and idle.
So Voyager would not know these things that came to pass.
But Tom Paris, Tuvok, Harry Kim, Chakotay, Kathrn Janeway, The Doctor, Seven of Nine and her beloved, B'Elanna Torres, Joe Carrey and every other member of the one hundred and forty six souls who were carried to Earth from the Delta Quadrant seventy thousand light years away – they would know.
Even though the ship could not hear them, or see them, or feel them any more they would continue to come here, every December and tell their stories and share their wine and food.
And Voyager would host them. Because it knew nothing else and because if it did know, it would have it no other way but so.
...
...
The End.