Second Chances: Chapter 28

A/N: I'm in a Facebook group about ridiculous kid names, and I realized that there's a distinct possibility that in 400 years, some of these will be old family names. I just couldn't resist.

Stardate 51012
January 2374
Mars Station, Mars

January brought Lt. B'Elanna Torres the best birthday present she could have asked for: the last of the diagnostics revealed that they had completed their repairs to the Jem'Hadar ship and it was ready for its first mission. Starfleet Intelligence was quite pleased at the news and the fact that it was ahead of schedule, despite the three weeks the project had been on hold while its crew was assigned to cleaning up after the Borg attack.

She chose to celebrate her own birthday and the clear diagnostics from the test flight by taking the afternoon off and granting the same to her crew. They had certainly worked hard enough over the last ten months to deserve it, which is why she was annoyed when they interrupted their free time less than an hour after she granted it. *Bamber to Torres,* Chief Bamber commed right after Torres had signed Izzy out of daycare.

"I'm off, Bamber," she reminded the electrical systems chief. "And so are you."

*I know, sir, and I'm sorry to bother you, but there's something here that you should probably see.*

She sighed. "You're going to have to be more specific, Chief," she said. "I already picked Izzy up from daycare."

*It's hard to explain, sir, but shouldn't take too long to show. Just bring Izzy up.*

"I can't just bring my toddler to a classified docking," Torres said dryly. "For one, she hasn't been read in yet."

She heard Bamber chuckle over the comm line. *What kind of damage do they think a two-year-old is going to do?*

"You've met my two-year-old," Torres reminded him. She sighed. "We'll be right up, but if this takes longer than ten minutes, it's going to have to wait until tomorrow." It was a nice day out, and she was going to enjoy an afternoon off with her daughter, because she hadn't had enough of those lately.

As expected, the presence of the toddler got a frown from the security ensign at the transporter station, until Torres pointed out that Izzy was two and couldn't even read yet, which would make her a pretty poor Dominion spy. As soon she stepped onto the ship, she regretted answering Bamber's comm. "Happy birthday!" the officers, chiefs, and mechanics greeted as she stepped onto the ship. She could only sigh and shake her head, and wonder how they had managed to trick her.

"Ben-lee!" Izzy shrieked excitedly, pulling away from her mother and toward Crewman Brynnlyleigh Pagano.

"You break it, you buy it," Torres warned Pagano as she handed off the toddler. The young crewman smiled over at her before grinning down at the toddler. Pagano was one of Torres' best mechanics; only 19, and she rarely found a broken piece of machinery she couldn't fix. Torres kept encouraging her to apply to the Academy and become an officer, but Pagano was currently focused on finding a man and having kids, and seemed to think going to school would be a distraction from that goal. Torres wanted to tell her that she was young and there was plenty of time for all of that, but since she had gotten married at 21 and had a baby at 22, she figured she didn't have much room to talk.

Ensign Strzelcyzk had produced a cake from somewhere—not the ship itself, as the stupid thing didn't even have replicators, despite their best efforts—and Torres sighed again. "You guys are going to get cake crumbs and frosting all over the bridge," she said.

"Well, yes," Strzelcyzk admitted. "But we have the mechanics to clean it up for us." She had a point, and Torres begrudgedly allowed for the celebration.

After how hard they had all worked over the last ten months, they all needed a celebration. Even if it was just for her birthday.

"So how old are you now, Lieutenant?" Bamber asked with a grin.

"Still old enough to be your project lead, Bamber," she reminded the chief, who was probably the same age as her father.

Twenty-five. She was a twenty-five-year-old widow with a two-year-old daughter, more than half of a master's degree in systems engineering, a dedicated crew of thirty officers, chiefs, and mechanics, and a Jem'Hadar warship that she was about to turn over to Starfleet Intelligence for missions that were outside of her need-to-know.

The next day found her back on the bridge of that warship, seated on the floor because the Jem'Hadar and Vorta apparently didn't believe in chairs, her attention focused on the PADD in her hands. "Another round of diagnostics?" Lt. Glass asked as he took a seat next to her. She chuckled and handed it off to him.

"Not quite," she said. "Tom's niece is a budding holophotographer. She sent me some pictures for my birthday, from our trip to Madagascar seven months ago." Happy birthday! I'd thought you like some holos of your monkey playing with the not-monkeys, Ainsley Sanders had written. Even at thirteen, Ainsley had had an eye for holophotography, and had perfectly captured the wonder and joy on Izzy's face as she had held a lemur, but what really got B'Elanna was how different Izzy looked. It had been seven months since that trip to Madagascar; the not-yet-two-year-old in the holos looked so much younger than the two-and-a-half-year-old whom she had dropped off at daycare a few hours before, and it had all been so gradual that she hadn't even noticed her daughter growing up. She wasn't one to romanticize the newborn and infant stages, but couldn't help but feel a little sad that the little girl in those holos was gone. The next thing she knew, Izzy would be an angry teenager sneaking out of the house and flying shuttles into lakes.

"You're really good with kids," he said as he handed the PADD back.

She snorted. "I'm sometimes good with one kid. Because I have to be." She looked around the bridge. "I spent more time fixing up this ship and figuring out how it works than I spent growing an entire person. It's hard to say good-bye to your children."

He chuckled at the comparison. "Well, you don't have to say good-bye just yet," he said. "You're going with it."

She snorted. "Right," she said sarcastically. "We'll just put Izzy in the bunk next to mine. That should work."

To her surprise, he didn't laugh. "I'm actually serious," he said, handing her the PADD he had been carrying. Her eyes widened with alarm and a little anger as she read it. "The crew from the Defiant is going to be taking her out on its first mission. Their chief engineer is a chief. You spent ten months learning how this ship works. How do you think a chief, a cadet, and a handful of mechanics are going to be able to learn the systems in a couple of weeks without someone to teach them?"

She stared at him for a long minute. "In case you've forgotten in the last two minutes, I have a toddler," she said, her words slow and measured. "Where is she supposed to go? It's not as if her father's here to watch her while I go gallivanting about Dominion space!"

"How do you know it's going to Dominion space?"

"It's a Dominion ship, Glass," she snapped. "I'm not an idiot. Don't change the subject. If it's an officer you're looking for, I'm sure Strzelcyzk or Rox can go."

He snorted. "And if our only concerns were the weapons or communications systems, that would be a great idea. But we need someone who understands everything about that ship." She glared at him for a long minute. "It wasn't my idea, but I do think it's the best one," he continued. "Nobody knows this ship better than you, and we need you for this mission to work. I know it's less than ideal, but I also know that you and Izzy have a lot of family on Earth who can watch her for a few weeks."

"I'm a single parent because of a 'few week' mission!"

"It will be really good for your career."

"I don't give a damn about my career!" she exclaimed. "The only thing I care about is my daughter, and I am the only parent she has left. I will give up my career and resign my commission before anyone makes me leave her!"

"We're a Federation at war," he replied quietly. "I hope you know that I'm not exaggerating when I say that this mission will most likely fail without you, and we really need this mission to succeed. This could turn the tide for the Alpha quadrant." It was his turn to stare for a minute before he continued, his voice still low. "Let's say you resign your commission. What do you think will happen if we let the Dominion get close to Earth? Do you think you and Izzy would be safe here?"

She narrowed her eyes angrily. "This was the plan all along, wasn't it?" she asked. "You never intended me to just… repair this ship and turn it over to a crew, did you? You always planned on me going on this mission." She gave a short laugh as she stood up and angrily began pacing. "I can't believe I didn't figure it out sooner!"

He watched her pacing, but didn't rise from his seat on the floor. "Captain Mehti wasn't sure anybody would be able to make this ship fly again," he said. "I told him that if you said you could do it, you would, but we had to make sure that you assumed we only needed you to fix it up."

"So you intentionally lied to me," she said flatly.

"Misled you," he corrected. "And yes." She glared at him again, so angry that she had to fight to keep her hand from curling into a fist. Angry at him, but also angry at herself, for not seeing what he was doing, for letting herself believe that she knew him because of their brief interactions as cadets years ago and letting herself believe that that shared history meant he cared about anything in her life. "I'm not going to apologize, Torres. This ship is our best opportunity to hit the Dominion where it hurts. That mission the Defiant crew is taking her on? It's to take out the ketracel-white facility in Cardassian space. With the minefield across the wormhole, they can't resupply, and no ketracel-white means—"

"No Jem'Hadar," she snapped. "I'm not an idiot, Glass."

"No, you're not," he agreed. "Which means you know how important this mission is in protecting the Federation and the entire quadrant. And Izzy."

"You do not get to use my daughter to force my hand." He didn't say anything, just continued to allow her to pace around the bridge while she thought about it, and she was sure that he knew the exact second she had changed her mind.

"Fine," she snapped. "One mission. Just to show the new crew how the damn thing works, and then I'm right back here, and you leave me alone." He nodded in agreement, which she didn't quite believe. "I need a few days to go to Earth to get everything settled with Izzy."