Second Chances: Chapter 32

Stardate 51079
February 2374
Dominion/Cardassian Space

Lt. B'Elanna Torres blinked hard at the flash of brightness behind her eyes, and it faded in response. She slowly sat up, then stood, rolling out her neck and shoulders before shaking each of her legs, a quick test to confirm that everything seemed to be working and nothing seemed to be broken. "Report," she said into engineering, glancing around at the mechanics similarly making their way to their feet.

"I think something exploded, sir," Crewman Anand offered. "Or maybe we were fired on?"

"I meant, is anyone hurt," she replied. They all looked at each other, nobody volunteering anything, and she took that as a no.

She made her way to a control panel and ran a quick damage report, sucking in air through her teeth at what she found. Life support was draining fast. The deflector was down. Sensors were down. Internal and external communications were off-line. The guidance system was down. Shields were at 10%. The core matrix was fried.

She quickly switched to auxiliary life support, then triaged the rest of the repairs. They wouldn't go anywhere fast without the warp core, but that was going to be a more involved repair. They needed a place to hide from the Jem'Hadar first, which meant they needed the sensors, deflector, and guidance system. And shields, because at this point, it wouldn't take much more than a single shot to blow them apart. Auxiliary life support would keep them alive, but it would start to get uncomfortable in an hour or so. She ran a more detailed damage report. "Pagano," she barked. "The sensor relay is disrupted at J47. Fix it. We need those sensors five minutes ago. Kister, internal comms. It appears the problem is at A374. Comm me as soon as you get them back on-line. Salo, external comms. Go with Kister and see if you can find anything else wrong. Drkari, Intrieri, get on the shields." She looked around to see who else was there; with her, Chief O'Brien, and Nog, they had a total of fifteen in the engineering section. O'Brien and Nog had been on the bridge and were probably still there. They had seven in engineering, and the others were off-duty, but appeared to be have been woken by the blast and were wandering into engineering. "Wheeler, deflector. It appears the problem is in the induction stabilizer, but the emitter array doesn't look great, either. Erryion, life support. I don't know where the problem is, but you're going to have a lot of officers complaining in about an hour if you don't find it." She tapped her combadge. "Torres to the bridge."

No response. And then she remembered internal comms were down and swore under her breath.

"Anand, you're with me," she said to the crewman. "The core is down, and I'm betting the navigation controls are, too."

They made their way to the bridge, toolkits in hand. "Lieutenant," Captain Sisko said when he noticed her. "Report."

"Several key systems are off-line," she said. "I have crews addressing the most critical repairs."

"Casualties?" Dr. Bashir asked.

"Some bumps and bruises," she replied. "Nothing serious."

Captain Sisko nodded absently. "You know this ship better than anybody," he finally said. "Suggestions?"

"The repairs to the warp core are going to take the full attention of Chief O'Brien, Cadet Nog, and myself for at least three days," she replied. "The other engineers and mechanics can take care of the other systems while we work on the core. We need to get in a secured position where we'll be safe while making repairs. Landing would be preferred. We're working on getting sensors back on line to see if there's anywhere we can go."

"We'll be vulnerable on a planet," Sisko commented.

"We're vulnerable here," she replied. "It's our best option."

Sisko looked around the bridge as if just seeing the damage for the first time. "Lieutenant, Chief, Cadet, get started," he finally said. "Let me know as soon as sensors are back on-line. We'll see if we can find us a place to hide until we can run."

Torres didn't think she had ever been proud of anyone the way she was proud of Crewman Pagano when she announced that she had fixed the sensors, a feeling that immediately soured when she saw what the sensors did: two Jem'Hadar fighters headed straight for them. She didn't even time to swear before Captain Sisko also spotted them. "We need options!" he said.

"These sensor readings make no sense!" Torres exclaimed in frustration. "There must be something else wrong with the array."

"What if there's not?" Cadet Nog asked slowly, also looking at the readings. She turned to him, a sarcastic reply on her lips, but he had a thoughtful expression on his face. "I took a class on astrologic phenomena in the spring semester of my first year," he said, his voice picking up steam. "Captain Archer of the first Enterprise—"

"A dark matter nebula," Torres interrupted. She vaguely remembered the story of Archer from her own Academy days, but remembered the key lesson. "If that is a dark matter nebula," she said, emphasizing the 'if,' "our sensors won't work in there. Which means theirs won't, either."

"Is there any way to confirm that it is a dark matter nebula?" Captain Sisko asked, and Nog was happy to chime in.

"Captain Archer illuminated—"

"Not without giving away our location," Torres interrupted. Like any cadets, Nog would spend the next several minutes giving the textbook explanation if allowed, and they didn't have that kind of time. The ship shook as the Jem'Hadar fighters began firing on them.

"I think that ship has sailed," Sisko said tightly. "It's either there or it's not, and right now, that's our best bet. Take us in, old man."

"Captain," Nog said hesitantly. "If I'm remembering that lecture right, these kinds of nebulae can contain star systems and planets, and without sensors—"

"Noted, Cadet," Sisko said. "Commander, try not to hit a sun."

"I'll do my best, Captain," Commander Dax said, sounding almost amused. The Jem'Hadar fired on them again, a direct hit that sent the ship shaking, klaxons bearing, Commander Dax flying, and consoles smoking.

They didn't hit a star, but did get caught up in the gravitational pull of an M-class planet. It was a rough landing, but they made it down in one piece.

Most of them. A few hours after they landed and security had set up a perimeter around the ship, Dr. Bashir was still examining Lt. Commander Dax in the makeshift sickbay in his quarters. From what Torres had gathered, it wasn't good, and that added an edge of urgency that she really hadn't needed.

After the rough landing, Torres ran another systems check and disseminated repair duties to the mechanics, and then she, O'Brien, and Nog got to work on the warp core. She discovered that they did know where engineering was, but confirmed that they still didn't understand boundaries. "Is it true that you're Admiral Paris' daughter-in-law?" Cadet Nog asked several hours into the repair. She frowned, but didn't move her eyes from the relay she was repairing.

"Where did you hear that from?" she asked sharply.

"So it's not true?"

She sighed. "Cadet," she said patiently. "I understand that you're…close, to your crewmates on the Defiant¸ but when you graduate and go into the 'Fleet, it's really not appropriate to question superior officers about their personal lives unless they bring it up."

She thought that that ended that line of questioning, but about fifteen minutes later, he commented, "I thought Earth females changed their names when they got married."

Torres bit back the impulse to point out that she wasn't born on Earth, nor lived there currently. She counted to ten and told herself that he was just curious about human customs, and given that there were a lot of humans in Starfleet, it would be helpful for him to understand some of them. "Some do, some don't," she finally said. "It's… cultural."

Nog seemed to consider that. "So you are from a human culture that does not?"

She snorted a laugh. "I was raised by a Klingon mother on a Federation colony," she said. "I'm not really 'from' a human culture." She could have claimed that Spanish cultures had different naming traditions and women didn't usually change their names with marriage - in fact, John's house in Mexico was registered to 'John Torres-Moreno', and Navi was listed as 'Naviana Torres-Tulon' - but while Isela spoke Spanish and cooked the best carne asade and barbacoa that Torres had ever had, she was also very proud of the fact that her family had been in Arizona for so many generations that she could produce documentation of ancestors being citizens of a country known as the United States of America, and liked to joke that she was better about following 'English' traditions than 'Spanish' ones. She had changed her name when she got married, but used her maiden name—Moreno—as a journalist until she retired, in order to create a distance between her professional and personal lives. "I just didn't see the need to change it," she said simply.

"And your husband doesn't mind?" Nog continued to press. Torres gave a snort of laughter.

"Why would that have made a difference?" she asked. It was such a non-issue that they had never even talked about it. Alicia had changed her name when she got married—Torres had no idea why; she had never asked—and Nicki had as well, but she freely admitted that that was part of her rebellion against Owen and his rules for the family. Sydney had tried being Ensign Paris, but had been teased about being an admiral's daughter so much by her fellow security officers during her first assignment that when she and Jens changed ships a few years later, she became Lt. Wyland.

"When you have children, how do you decide what name they have?"

She laughed despite herself. "We have a daughter," she said. "She has her father's name. That's traditional in most human cultures."

"You have a daughter?" Chief O'Brien asked. Torres nodded.

"Izzy. She's two."

"That's a fun age," the chief said. "My daughter Molly is six, and my son, Yoshi, is eight months old." He launched into some story about something his daughter had done when she was Izzy's age, and Torres made a mental note to thank him later for distracting Nog from the questions about her personal life.

On the second day on the planet, Torres and O'Brien were working through the recalibration of the warp coils, a long, tedious process that Torres preferred to leave to other people, because it involved hours of laying on her back without moving, and that was somehow much harder on her body than running a sub-3 hour marathon in San Francisco with her sister-in-law. Which she got a painful reminder of when her muscles began cramping. "Hu'tegh!" she exclaimed through gritted teeth. It felt like every muscle in her left leg was contracted as tight as they could be, all at the same time.

She still had the muscle stimulators she had used when she was in a coma and recovering from it, and still used them when she had long repairs that kept her in one position for a prolonged period of time, in order to keep her muscles from cramping. She had put them on under her uniform after her most recent sonic shower, but forgot to turn them on when they began the recalibration.

"You okay?" O'Brien asked from his position a meter away.

"Just a leg cramp," she managed through gritted teeth as she groped for the stimulators. She finally got the one on her calf, then the one on her thigh, and felt her breathing begin to slow as she felt them begin to work on the cramp. "I'll be fine in a minute."

"Let me call Dr. Bashir," O'Brien offered.

"No, I'm fine," she protested, but he had already called the physician.

Her leg was mostly better by the time Dr. Bashir arrived. "I'm fine," she protested again as he scanned her leg. "I just don't do well when I don't get to move around."

"There's no harm in being thorough," he said. "You have a complicated medical history."

She snorted. "I know," she replied. "I was there for it." Mostly; all she remembered about the snake bite incident was loading up the shuttle at the end of the course, the sharp pain from the puncture of the snake's fangs, an intense heat that began at her ankle, and the next thing she knew, she was in a hospital bed and Tom was asleep in the chair next to her. She had raised her hand to poke him, startled by how difficult that simple movement had been. She meant to tease him about drooling on her bed, but the words didn't come out right, her tongue not cooperating with her brain. She had panicked, not knowing what was going on, and Tom had to call for a nurse, who called for Dr. Zalun, who had beamed over from home so quickly that he was still in his pajamas. "I just need to stretch my legs."

Dr. Bashir frowned and put away his tricorder. "A Jem'Hadar ship crashed a few kilometers from here," he said. "Nobody is stretching their legs very far." She neglected pointing out that the security officers on patrol were, because she didn't want anything to be interpreted as volunteering for patrol. "The Vorta was injured and will recover," Dr. Bashir continued. She wondered if he was just talking to fill silence she felt no need to be filled or if he honestly thought she cared about what was going on outside engineering, much less outside the ship. She turned off the muscle stimulators—they were great for preventing cramps and slowing muscle atrophy, but they also blocked intentional movements—and gave her knee a few experimental bends before she determined it wasn't going to cramp again. "Their supply of White is limited. They're going to get desperate," Bashir continued. If he was saying this to give her incentive to work faster, he was talking to the wrong engineer. She only knew how to work at one speed, and still had yet to take a break since they landed.

"Thanks for the update," Torres said as she stood and did a few tight laps around the warp core, a pretty poor substitute for the long miles she needed to run to work off her feelings of cabin fever. She returned to her location by Chief O'Brien, this time turning on the muscle stimulators on both legs before returning to her supine position under the warp coils. Already fully focused again on her work, she didn't even register the sound of Dr. Bashir leaving a few minutes later.