Kathryn Janeway – The Big Goodbye

            Kathryn Janeway couldn't shake the feeling that she was sitting by a dear friend's deathbed, waiting for the last breath, wanting the loss as much as she wanted to keep clinging.

            But she wasn't waiting by a deathbed.  She was walking the corridors of her ship, as she had done so many times over the past seven years.  Now, though, her pace was not the purposeful stride of a captain on her way to some certain destination, but a slow, meandering ramble that was punctuated now and again by a stop to look out a nearby viewport, or to choose which way to turn at a given junction – or, sometimes, for no particular reason at all.  Every step she took was heavy with the feeling of never again.

            The ship was empty but for herself and a few Starfleet technicians finishing up their work, downloading the last of the data from the computers and beginning the work of removing Voyager's warp drive.  In another few weeks the ship would become an orbital museum, a testament to its long journey and its crew – as well as its captain, who didn't really like the idea of having a memorial dedicated to her achievements while she was still alive.  While she was not entirely comfortable with the situation, she did take some measure of comfort from the knowledge that Voyager would be transformed into a memorial, instead of being decommissioned and dismantled as most ships were once they had reached the end of their lifespan.

            Janeway's own fate was less certain than that of her ship.  Now that the overwhelming deluge of celebrations, debriefings and interviews that had followed Voyager's return to Earth was finally letting up, she was faced with the more serious and long-term consequences of her homecoming.  The legal problems faced by certain members of her crew – the former Maquis and the Doctor – had come to a satisfactory end, but her own troubles were just beginning.  During the past seven years she'd done some things that could be charitably called bending the rules: she had decided upon those questionable courses of action only when there were no better alternatives, but she would still have to answer for her command decisions in a court-martial.  And even if she was acquitted…what then?  She would be a captain without a ship, and she couldn't see herself on the bridge of any ship other than Voyager.

            She'd been trying to get home for so long, and now that she was here everything seemed to be falling down around her ears.  It was funny, in a bitter kind of way.

            If she had nothing to look forward to in the long term, at least she had something good coming in the short term.  Tomorrow she and her senior staff would gather for their last meal together in the ship's mess hall – it was their own way of celebrating the end of the long journey they had taken.  While they had been the focus of many Starfleet-organized commemorative events during the past month, the senior staff of Voyager felt that they needed to acknowledge the significance of their journey, as well as the end of it.  That need was something that only they could really understand.

            Janeway was taking advantage of her last opportunity to visit all the places aboard her ship that had been so significant to her over the last seven years – she had already been to engineering, the mess hall, cargo bay two, sickbay, the conference room and her own quarters.  Engineering had been filled with people she didn't know, techs assigned to work on the ship's systems – the other places had felt eerily empty, especially the mess hall.

            Now there was only one more place to visit.  The turbolift doors opened as Janeway approached.  She stepped through and pivoted on her heel as they closed, automatically assuming an "at-ease" position as she faced the exit.  "Bridge," she ordered.  She felt the lift hum and begin to move.  Out of the corner of her eye she watched the indicator lights flow downward.  For some reason she had expected the ride to feel as if it took longer than it usually did – but it didn't.  The doors swished open to reveal Voyager's bridge.

            Janeway stepped forward and took in the empty bridge with a careful, deliberate gaze.  She walked around behind the Ops and Security stations, brushing her fingers over the darkened controls at each – all ship's functions were now being monitored by a few techs in engineering.  She moved down to the conn station and leaned on it, her eyes on the blank gray of the main viewscreen before her.  She straightened up and turned around, slowly, then walked up to the captain's chair, at the heart of the now-deserted bridge.  With a sigh, she settled into the familiar seat.

            If she'd had any good reasons for revisiting Voyager, she had forgotten them.  Her nostalgic tour through the ship had not given her any comfort – on the contrary, it had only made her feel worse.  She stood up from her chair and headed for the turbolift, but stopped when she realized that she hadn't visited her ready room yet.  For a few seconds she remained where she was, debating whether or not the stop would be worth it.  Might as well, she concluded.  After all, I'm already here.  After making that decision turned to her right and walked through the door into the ready room.

            She paused in the doorway and looked over the room for a few moments, as she had the bridge, before stepping forward and letting the door close behind her.  Then she directed her attention viewports on the opposite wall of the room.  Outside was not the star-filled black of space, but the gleaming white wall of the docking port of Spacedock.  Janeway could see a line of windows in that wall – on the other side of it, tiny figures worked at consoles in a control room.  She wondered if they could see her through her own ship's viewports.  They didn't seem to take any notice of her at all.

            Janeway made a slow circuit around the ready room, pausing to run her hand over the top of her desk.  As she regarded her dim reflection in the polished surface she remembered something that Admiral Janeway, her future self, had said a month and another lifetime ago – Voyager had been turned into a museum in that timeline, too, and she'd told the curator that if he wanted to make the ready room really authentic, he should always leave a steaming pot of coffee on the desk.  Captain Janeway didn't doubt that Admiral Janeway had actually made that suggestion – it was the kind of thing she would do – but she was unsure as to whether it had been a flippant request or an earnest one.  She hadn't asked.

            But she was certainly going to ask that the curators put a fresh pot of coffee, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, on the ready room desk.  It would make this place less like a museum exhibit and more like a re-creation.  She was sure that the rest of the crew would have their own suggestions to make, ideas about how they wanted to be remembered.  They would remember Voyager for the rest of their days, but the ship would also remember them.  And some future visitors to this ship would do just what she had done today, touring through the ship to try and recapture a sense of its past…

            With that realization came a deep sense of contentment.  Voyager meant something, and would mean something, even to those who had not journeyed aboard it in the Delta Quadrant.  The long-term future for Kathryn Janeway might not be determined yet, but in the very long term, she had no doubts.

            She went over to the replicator near the desk.  The controls were still lit, so it probably hadn't been taken offline yet.  Janeway punched a certain sequence of glowing rectangles, and a thermos of black coffee materialized in the replicator's cubby.  She removed the thermos from the cubby and unscrewed the top.  With a satisfied nod, she placed the thermos on her desk, and smiled as she inhaled the aroma of the steam that rose from it.