Second Chances: Chapter 2

A/N: Thanks to everyone who read and/or reviewed! I'm enjoying revisiting this story and polishing it up, and it's nice to know there are other people out there enjoying it as well :)

And now, to the heart of the story.

Stardate 48401.97
2371
Mars Station

It was hard to see, and that darkness—dimmed lights, smoke, blown consoles—was almost more distracting to her than the constant klaxons of the red alert and the discordant beeps coming from almost every workstation on the bridge. "Hello?" she called out, squinting into the thick atmosphere, trying to make out shapes of bulkheads, chairs, people, anything. She had no idea what was going on, and that fact was scarier to her than the catastrophe that the ship had obviously just gone through.

Lt. B'Elanna Torres awoke with a gasp, bolting upright in bed. She blinked at the sudden change in surroundings and groaned. Another nightmare, she thought bitterly as she collapsed back down, the second time she had been awoken by one in as many days. It wasn't the scenario that bothered her—a red alert, while adrenaline pumping, was hardly the scariest thing a Starfleet officer, even a station-based researcher such as herself, could face—but just how vivid it was, how clear everything seemed to be, from the sights to the sounds to the smells, and how stubbornly it refused to drift away like any other dream.

"Computer, what time is it?" she finally asked, staring up at the ceiling.

*The time is 0453.* Torres groaned again, and knowing that she wouldn't be getting any more sleep that morning, resolutely threw off the covers and rolled out of bed. Her eyes fell on the empty other side and she sighed, quickly calculated days and weeks. Five weeks today, she realized. Five weeks since Tom had left with Voyager to pick up a Maquis crew in the Badlands. They were supposed to have completed their mission and returned to Deep Space Nine over a week ago, but they knew from the beginning that such missions didn't have predictable timelines. Still, she wished he would just come home already. This was almost the longest they had been apart since she visited his apartment on a whim in the middle of her second classman year at the Academy, and not even being able to speak on the comm just made it that much worse.

She made her way to the apartment's bathroom, stripping out of the tank top and shorts she slept in on the way, and studied her reflection for a long minute, something she had caught herself doing more recently. There still wasn't much change, just a slight rounding of her abdomen where before had just been muscle. "I'm blaming these nightmares on you," she said to her belly, feeling silly addressing a fifteen-week fetus—or Paris-ite, as her sister-in-law had taken to calling it—but chalked it up to yet another thing the pregnancy hormones were doing to her mind and body. First nightmares, then conversations… She smiled slightly at the thought of what might come next. Nesting, probably, although that was much more Tom's department than hers. She'd let him pick out the crib and mobiles and color of the walls, because while all of those things fell under the category of 'things that need to be done' to her, Tom would enjoy each and every one of them.

A quick sonic shower later, she was back in the bedroom, fastening closed her uniform—which was beginning to get a bit snug, telling her that it might be time to switch to maternity uniforms—when her eyes fell on the red-shouldered uniforms hanging next to her gold-shouldered ones. She sighed again, taking another look at the bed to confirm that it was, in fact, empty, and again, just wished her husband would get home soon. She wasn't usually this sentimental—another thing to blame the pregnancy hormones on, she figured.

Still several hours before she usually appeared at her workstation, she set up her portable console on the table and headed for the replicator. She opened her mouth to order a raktajino, then remembering the words of both her hybrid obstetrician and his local counterpart on Mars Station, reconsidered, deciding she needed to add some actual food to that order. "Raktajino, hot, and banana pancakes with maple syrup."

They just told her to eat breakfast. They never said it had to have any nutritional value to it.

*Nutritional supplementation added, by order of Dr. Yamisuko,* the computer informed her before her food appeared. Her eyes narrowed at the words.

"Oh, he's good," she acknowledged in a dark murmur. She made a mental note to give him a piece of her mind at her next appointment.

If it changed the taste of the food any, she didn't pick up on it, her attention focused on the data from her last set of experiments and plans for her next set of experiments as she ate, and before she knew it, it was time to head to her workstation. She quickly tied her hair into a low bun on the back of her neck, the same hairstyle she had been displaying since her days at the Academy, and began the trek and transport to her familiar—sometimes more familiar than her apartment—workstation in the Warp Technologies Development Group at Utopia Planitia, nodding greetings to fellow officers on her way.

She had been on the Voyager project right up until the ship left—with her husband in the helmsman chair—and afterwards, had been immediately transferred to the Theoretical Propulsion Group, which in her mind, was much more rewarding work. It was cutting edge engineering at its most cutting edge; while making sure everything on Voyager had been functioning properly was a source of relief to her as a wife who was sending her husband on the ship, the TPG was actually coming up with new ways of making ships go faster, further, and more efficiently. It was pretty much what she had always dreamed of doing, and getting that posting as a lieutenant, jg… Well, that was more than she could have ever dreamed of. She had been excited to have any posting with the Warp Technologies Development Group, but the TPG was the elite of the elite.

Of course, it was also the hardest work to grasp, and more than once, the ramblings of one of her fellow group members about some esoteric theoretical physics theorem had left her with a headache for a week, similar to the one she had when they were finished with their weekly status meeting. Hoping it would fade once she distracted herself with work, she had a quick lunch and promptly positioned herself in front of her workstation, ready to get another analysis going.

She was still in the process of setting up her next experiment when the doors to the lab slid open, revealing Commander Rohder accompanying three Starfleet admirals. Torres' eyebrows shot up in amusement at the sight of one of them, but figured if her father-in-law wanted to take an official tour of the lab, she wasn't going to stand in his way, and continued with her experiment.

To her surprise, instead of doing the usual tour of the area with the words that Torres now had memorized, for the number of times she had heard Rohder give them in the last five weeks, they headed straight for her station. "B'Elanna," Admiral Owen Paris said as they approached, his face as serious as it always was when he was on duty, "Commander Rohder said we can use his office."

She frowned slightly, uncertain what the most junior member of the group could possibly add to a status briefing. "Yes, sir," she replied, not even registering the fact that he had referred to her by first name, something he never did when they were on duty. Strict professionalism at work was how Admiral Paris lived his life; it was that strict professionalism that caused the rift between the admiral and his son that was still mending.

Torres followed the commander and three admirals into Commander Rohder's office and was further confused when Rohder immediately left, closing the door behind him. "Sir?" she asked, directing the question toward Paris, the only of the three she even recognized. She didn't know what it was, if it was something in his face or something about the way he couldn't quite meet her eye, but alarms began going off that this wasn't a routine status briefing to the admiralty.

"B'Elanna," Paris said again, stopping to clear his throat. "This is Admiral Trigleth and Admiral Mayer." And suddenly she knew what this was about.

"No," she said definitively, shaking her head. "No."

"B'Elanna—"

"Don't say it," she said warningly.

"B'Elanna, I'm so sorry—"

"No, it can't be," she interrupted her father-in-law, feeling her last bit of self-composure fall away. "No. Owen, it was a three-week mission…"

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant," one of the other admirals—Trigleth or Mayer, she couldn't care to distinguish them now—said. "I regret to inform you that the U.S.S. Voyager was lost in the Badlands—"

"No." She turned to Admiral Paris, a wild and panicked look in her eyes. "Owen, it has to be a mistake, he can't be…"

"There's nothing left of the ship, B'Elanna," he said gently, and she could see the world falling apart in his eyes. "It's just…gone."

"It can't be right," she argued. "Ships don't just disappear. If they were destroyed, there would be something. He can't be…"

"Voyager's official status is 'missing,'" one of the other admirals informed her. "And we're still doing everything we can to find her, but after a week of searching—"

"No," she repeated, as stubbornly and definitively as before. "No. You're wrong." She didn't give any of the three men a chance to say anything else before she was out of the room.