"Two dots."
There they were - two tiny little blue things, almost with lives of their own. Slowly they appeared on the screen, two teeny weeny areoles burned out of black sky, two little specks of dirt on an otherwise pristine beach, then they got altogether bigger. They were perfect, beating, edges phaser- sliced into seamless little boundaries which grew to a point and then stopped.
"What action, Captain?"
She had seen this before. Two dots on a radar screen were altogether not uncommon. Blue dots - they meant anything from benign tradeships to Cardassian spies to two borg learner drives hogging the galaxy highways. Sometimes the radar dots got bigger and bigger, and if they got big too fast then Captain Janeway had to trust her untrustworthy crew to tell her whether to fire, or whether to sit and get fired at. If they disappeared then it was usually a good thing. If they stayed and if she fired at it, and they didn't disappear, then it would mean that Q was playing some kind of practical joke on her again in hope of getting her to take a bath with him. Most of the time when you're lost in the Delta Quadrant you're highly suspicious of dots you haven't seen before, or weren't expecting. Dots are interesting things seven years into a voyage.
Enter Captain Kathryn Janeway. To some, she's just a woman with a weird voice and even weirder tits. To the advertisers who were pro-sending a woman into space in charge of a starship, she's gone where no woman has ever gone before. To her detractors, she subjects a ship to the whims and fancies of ovulating-feelinghorny-apocalypse-ovulating. a cycle almost as predictable as the perfume choice of a Klingon in the name of hiding his peaty scent. To the cynic, she's just there keeping the other important woman on board company - Chatokay. To Q, she's the chick who'll never get into a bath with an ample supply of bubbles and bubble bath. To her crew, she's. uhm. well. the female reincarnation of Jean-Luc Picard, to put it mildly. Not that that's all bad. Picard was nice in general, a pity about his insane obsession with his oven toaster.
So back to the dots. Blue dots are treated with an extreme amount of caution and consternation in the Delta Quadrant. Especially if they're growing, bleeping blue dots who are there when they're not expected to be. One blue dot, not so bad. One red dot, it depends on the kind of scanning. But two dots are almost never good. Janeway's eyes narrowed.
"Are you sure you didn't screw it up this time? I don't want to get all worked up for nothing."
"Shall we scan again, Captain?"
"Go ahead. And don't sing when you're working, you little nincompoop!"
"2nd scan shows results similar to first scan."
Two blue dots.
"You're pregnant."
*************************************************
Blue dots are dangerous on radar screens. Growing, bleeping blue dots especially. Blue dots, side by side, in a nice, perfectly coupled pair on the urine strip of a pregnancy test kit, are apocalypse rising part deux. You don't want blue dots of that kind anywhere in the Delta Quadrant. you won't mind even getting a positive test result for a mammogram or a diagnosis of a lazy ovary or even a batch of Neelix's horrid cooking, but the thought of walking around for then next nine months like an oversized ape in the presence of a certain borg who never seems to get fat makes hugging a Klingon a viable alternative. Even worse, when you realise that the silly hologram doctor's ethics subcode won't allow him to terminate pregnancies. Give him all the time in the world he wants to sing Clementine when he's not singing Medical College anatomy songs and he still won't do it for you. In fact, the subprogram was so well written he wouldn't even do it to you if you asked. Even if Seven asked.
"Twice positive, Captain. The probability of you not being conceiving is 0.01%"
"Have you got a pukebag?"
He passed it to her with the same old deadpan smile and watched her disgorge the contents of the morning's breakfast into it. No pity - Neelix would say something else about that, but oh well. it was bound to come out in some form or another. The doctor turned and smirked. It even everyday when you find out that the Captain is in danger of producing a miniature version of herself. it never happened with Kirk (although there a suspicious number of kids who looked like Douglas T. on Enterprise), it never happened with Jean Luc (toaster ovens don't have uteri), and it never happened on DS9 because that silly Sisko was too busy giving money away in Atlantic Titty to realise that it was as much Atlantic Pussy as it was Atlantic Titty. As a policy Sisko never slept around. wanted to keep an air of mystery on the station. apparently someone told him women found it attractive. But to cut a long story short, nothing funny ever happened on DS9. But ever since Kim vowed never to step into the dining hall again the Doctor knew that things would always get a little interesting here. (He knew all about it. Seven poured her heart out to the one man or woman who wouldn't try to get into her catsuit.) So it was with a little glint in his eye that he watched Janeway remark that the little one had better be as capable as she had been. As capable as she had been in getting some bone inside her? That wasn't the doctor's business. He just wished that he wouldn't have two Janeways talking in his ear. One screechy voice was more than enough, thank you.
"May I ask a private question, Captain?"
"Oh fine. go ahead."
"Whose, is it?" His eyes remained focussed. No judgement. Holograms do not judge although they don't like being judged with respect to their singing voices.
And with that, she turned and walked out.
************************************************
The fact is, she didn't know. Back on the bridge everything was normal. Not a speck of dirt where there shouldn't have been, no dots of any kind, red, blue or yellow, on the radar screen. Everything had been going as perfectly for as long as she could remember - she'd long dreamt of a spell like this. Month after month with nothing to do. No one to fight, no one to run from. Of course as we all well know by now, when you have no one to run from, you ending up finding someone to run to, and it was in this knowledge that the Captain remarked that she shouldn't feel too bad about herself. Even carcinogen addicts with weird voices get a little itchy there sometimes, and as hard as a woman can try, some itches just have to be scratched. How they are scratched, is really up to the individual, she thought to herself. Sometimes one has enough fun in the shower, sometimes one gets all the satisfaction one needs simply from allowing a few missiles to strike the Ship before retaliating. (She did love the little upward vibrations her chair transmitted up to her every time the ship was hit. Once she was so turned on she totally forgot about the photon cannons exploding all around her, and it would have been far worse if not for Chatokay's being totally disgusted at the sight of his Captain getting off in the middle of an intergalactic battle he decided to destroy the enemy to save himself from having to die to the sight of Janeway.) But Janeway, like any experienced woman who's had her fair share of fun before getting lost, there's really no substitute for.
The one big problem with actually living on a starship is that you can't really get rid of your exes. You hit it off with one person, and if it doesn't work out, you can't move out lock stock and barrel and pretend nothing ever happened. You're bound to run into him in the dining hall, in the queue for the toilet, on the scout mission you really didn't want to have to go for, or in the worst of cases, sharing the same escape capsule. Janeway looked around and realised that Harry never consciously made eye- contact with Seven, although the same couldn't be said vice versa. Kes was nowhere to be found. B'Elanna and Chatokay hadn't been speaking as often as they used to. Actually being captain still has its advantages. the casual observer notes that in the years following Voyager's departure, an increasing number of males have been lost, missing in action, to suspicious scout missions to unknown planets and in uncharted territories. Janeway knew there was always this option when it came to human exes, but you can't just jettison a baby away by sending him on a manned mission to an obscure little star, can you? You can't! It'd be repugnant even to a Q.
Besides, she figured, she had to break out of this bad habit of sending exes away like that. If she'd done that to all her exes on this dang ship she'd pretty much be trying to find a way home alone, perhaps with Seven and the doctor for company. And if that was the case, who knows what they would have been up to? Piloting a big ship solo was always a dream. It's fine when you actually know where you're going, but when you're lost? Nuh- uh. Besides, if every one of her exes manifested him/herself on the radar screen as one blue dot, she'd have a few black dots on a blue screen.
Janeway shuddered at the thought.
************************************************
She started out into space. It would be just a while more before she started losing her figure. Not that anyone would have noticed. the days when she had one of the better figures on the ship had long gone. Going home and having the baby wasn't an option, nor was getting rid of it because the doctor was too nice a guy. The most obvious thing to do was to hunt down the last person.
He was standing as he always had been, waiting for his food. People sometimes wondered what he loved about the cooking on this ship. perhaps Asians have different configurations concerning taste buds. Janeway saw the neatly-combed, side-parted hair, the bulging chest, the defined biceps, the squarish jaws. He was still as cute as ever. and by gum beneath that silly yellow tog he had the nicest, most undeviant lightsaber one could ever imagine. Normally she wouldn't have stood a chance with him, but two months back he was looking particularly down and asked for shore leave. He got his shore leave and a little more.
"Mr Kim, can we talk?"
Harry's eyes lit up.
"So tell me. Are we really going to be doing some talking? Or."
Already it was starting to show.
"Quit it, boy." Even as she said this she couldn't have but feel insanely attracted to him as ever. "This one's business."
"Aye, Captain."
"I'm pregnant."
"Not mine, Captain. Seven rendered me impotent later that day when I rejected her offer to further explore her humanity. I was sad only for that reason, and submitted to your demands only because I knew that'd be the last time."
************************************************
"Doctor to Janeway. Ultrasound results. He's got whiskers."
There they were - two tiny little blue things, almost with lives of their own. Slowly they appeared on the screen, two teeny weeny areoles burned out of black sky, two little specks of dirt on an otherwise pristine beach, then they got altogether bigger. They were perfect, beating, edges phaser- sliced into seamless little boundaries which grew to a point and then stopped.
"What action, Captain?"
She had seen this before. Two dots on a radar screen were altogether not uncommon. Blue dots - they meant anything from benign tradeships to Cardassian spies to two borg learner drives hogging the galaxy highways. Sometimes the radar dots got bigger and bigger, and if they got big too fast then Captain Janeway had to trust her untrustworthy crew to tell her whether to fire, or whether to sit and get fired at. If they disappeared then it was usually a good thing. If they stayed and if she fired at it, and they didn't disappear, then it would mean that Q was playing some kind of practical joke on her again in hope of getting her to take a bath with him. Most of the time when you're lost in the Delta Quadrant you're highly suspicious of dots you haven't seen before, or weren't expecting. Dots are interesting things seven years into a voyage.
Enter Captain Kathryn Janeway. To some, she's just a woman with a weird voice and even weirder tits. To the advertisers who were pro-sending a woman into space in charge of a starship, she's gone where no woman has ever gone before. To her detractors, she subjects a ship to the whims and fancies of ovulating-feelinghorny-apocalypse-ovulating. a cycle almost as predictable as the perfume choice of a Klingon in the name of hiding his peaty scent. To the cynic, she's just there keeping the other important woman on board company - Chatokay. To Q, she's the chick who'll never get into a bath with an ample supply of bubbles and bubble bath. To her crew, she's. uhm. well. the female reincarnation of Jean-Luc Picard, to put it mildly. Not that that's all bad. Picard was nice in general, a pity about his insane obsession with his oven toaster.
So back to the dots. Blue dots are treated with an extreme amount of caution and consternation in the Delta Quadrant. Especially if they're growing, bleeping blue dots who are there when they're not expected to be. One blue dot, not so bad. One red dot, it depends on the kind of scanning. But two dots are almost never good. Janeway's eyes narrowed.
"Are you sure you didn't screw it up this time? I don't want to get all worked up for nothing."
"Shall we scan again, Captain?"
"Go ahead. And don't sing when you're working, you little nincompoop!"
"2nd scan shows results similar to first scan."
Two blue dots.
"You're pregnant."
*************************************************
Blue dots are dangerous on radar screens. Growing, bleeping blue dots especially. Blue dots, side by side, in a nice, perfectly coupled pair on the urine strip of a pregnancy test kit, are apocalypse rising part deux. You don't want blue dots of that kind anywhere in the Delta Quadrant. you won't mind even getting a positive test result for a mammogram or a diagnosis of a lazy ovary or even a batch of Neelix's horrid cooking, but the thought of walking around for then next nine months like an oversized ape in the presence of a certain borg who never seems to get fat makes hugging a Klingon a viable alternative. Even worse, when you realise that the silly hologram doctor's ethics subcode won't allow him to terminate pregnancies. Give him all the time in the world he wants to sing Clementine when he's not singing Medical College anatomy songs and he still won't do it for you. In fact, the subprogram was so well written he wouldn't even do it to you if you asked. Even if Seven asked.
"Twice positive, Captain. The probability of you not being conceiving is 0.01%"
"Have you got a pukebag?"
He passed it to her with the same old deadpan smile and watched her disgorge the contents of the morning's breakfast into it. No pity - Neelix would say something else about that, but oh well. it was bound to come out in some form or another. The doctor turned and smirked. It even everyday when you find out that the Captain is in danger of producing a miniature version of herself. it never happened with Kirk (although there a suspicious number of kids who looked like Douglas T. on Enterprise), it never happened with Jean Luc (toaster ovens don't have uteri), and it never happened on DS9 because that silly Sisko was too busy giving money away in Atlantic Titty to realise that it was as much Atlantic Pussy as it was Atlantic Titty. As a policy Sisko never slept around. wanted to keep an air of mystery on the station. apparently someone told him women found it attractive. But to cut a long story short, nothing funny ever happened on DS9. But ever since Kim vowed never to step into the dining hall again the Doctor knew that things would always get a little interesting here. (He knew all about it. Seven poured her heart out to the one man or woman who wouldn't try to get into her catsuit.) So it was with a little glint in his eye that he watched Janeway remark that the little one had better be as capable as she had been. As capable as she had been in getting some bone inside her? That wasn't the doctor's business. He just wished that he wouldn't have two Janeways talking in his ear. One screechy voice was more than enough, thank you.
"May I ask a private question, Captain?"
"Oh fine. go ahead."
"Whose, is it?" His eyes remained focussed. No judgement. Holograms do not judge although they don't like being judged with respect to their singing voices.
And with that, she turned and walked out.
************************************************
The fact is, she didn't know. Back on the bridge everything was normal. Not a speck of dirt where there shouldn't have been, no dots of any kind, red, blue or yellow, on the radar screen. Everything had been going as perfectly for as long as she could remember - she'd long dreamt of a spell like this. Month after month with nothing to do. No one to fight, no one to run from. Of course as we all well know by now, when you have no one to run from, you ending up finding someone to run to, and it was in this knowledge that the Captain remarked that she shouldn't feel too bad about herself. Even carcinogen addicts with weird voices get a little itchy there sometimes, and as hard as a woman can try, some itches just have to be scratched. How they are scratched, is really up to the individual, she thought to herself. Sometimes one has enough fun in the shower, sometimes one gets all the satisfaction one needs simply from allowing a few missiles to strike the Ship before retaliating. (She did love the little upward vibrations her chair transmitted up to her every time the ship was hit. Once she was so turned on she totally forgot about the photon cannons exploding all around her, and it would have been far worse if not for Chatokay's being totally disgusted at the sight of his Captain getting off in the middle of an intergalactic battle he decided to destroy the enemy to save himself from having to die to the sight of Janeway.) But Janeway, like any experienced woman who's had her fair share of fun before getting lost, there's really no substitute for.
The one big problem with actually living on a starship is that you can't really get rid of your exes. You hit it off with one person, and if it doesn't work out, you can't move out lock stock and barrel and pretend nothing ever happened. You're bound to run into him in the dining hall, in the queue for the toilet, on the scout mission you really didn't want to have to go for, or in the worst of cases, sharing the same escape capsule. Janeway looked around and realised that Harry never consciously made eye- contact with Seven, although the same couldn't be said vice versa. Kes was nowhere to be found. B'Elanna and Chatokay hadn't been speaking as often as they used to. Actually being captain still has its advantages. the casual observer notes that in the years following Voyager's departure, an increasing number of males have been lost, missing in action, to suspicious scout missions to unknown planets and in uncharted territories. Janeway knew there was always this option when it came to human exes, but you can't just jettison a baby away by sending him on a manned mission to an obscure little star, can you? You can't! It'd be repugnant even to a Q.
Besides, she figured, she had to break out of this bad habit of sending exes away like that. If she'd done that to all her exes on this dang ship she'd pretty much be trying to find a way home alone, perhaps with Seven and the doctor for company. And if that was the case, who knows what they would have been up to? Piloting a big ship solo was always a dream. It's fine when you actually know where you're going, but when you're lost? Nuh- uh. Besides, if every one of her exes manifested him/herself on the radar screen as one blue dot, she'd have a few black dots on a blue screen.
Janeway shuddered at the thought.
************************************************
She started out into space. It would be just a while more before she started losing her figure. Not that anyone would have noticed. the days when she had one of the better figures on the ship had long gone. Going home and having the baby wasn't an option, nor was getting rid of it because the doctor was too nice a guy. The most obvious thing to do was to hunt down the last person.
He was standing as he always had been, waiting for his food. People sometimes wondered what he loved about the cooking on this ship. perhaps Asians have different configurations concerning taste buds. Janeway saw the neatly-combed, side-parted hair, the bulging chest, the defined biceps, the squarish jaws. He was still as cute as ever. and by gum beneath that silly yellow tog he had the nicest, most undeviant lightsaber one could ever imagine. Normally she wouldn't have stood a chance with him, but two months back he was looking particularly down and asked for shore leave. He got his shore leave and a little more.
"Mr Kim, can we talk?"
Harry's eyes lit up.
"So tell me. Are we really going to be doing some talking? Or."
Already it was starting to show.
"Quit it, boy." Even as she said this she couldn't have but feel insanely attracted to him as ever. "This one's business."
"Aye, Captain."
"I'm pregnant."
"Not mine, Captain. Seven rendered me impotent later that day when I rejected her offer to further explore her humanity. I was sad only for that reason, and submitted to your demands only because I knew that'd be the last time."
************************************************
"Doctor to Janeway. Ultrasound results. He's got whiskers."