Second Chances: Chapter 42
A/N: Dropped in a little Easter Egg so everyone knows what's happening back in our prime universe.
Stardate 51183
April 2374
Mars Station, Mars
Lt. B'Elanna Torres was reading through the astrometrics data from the various B'Elanna Torres' when Lt. Michael Glass knocked against the doorframe of her open office door. "Welcome back to reality," he joked. She really shouldn't have been surprised that he knew about the quantum fissure, given that he was an intelligence officer, but she didn't appreciate people knowing her business.
She frowned as she looked up at him. "I'm sorry, do I know you?"
He looked concerned for a second, then grinned. "And they say you don't have a sense of humor," he said.
She snorted, her attention already back on her console. "Nobody says that," she replied. "They're too afraid of me."
"You're not as scary as you like to think," he said as he took a seat across from her desk. "Happy Day of Honor, by the way."
"You're two days late," she replied. It wasn't as if she celebrated Klingon holidays; she only knew the date because Lt. Commander Worf had sent her a message, and she had checked and confirmed that, yes, it had been the Day of Honor.
"Do anything to celebrate?"
She snorted again. "No," she replied. She had started the day on Earth; John had commed to ask if she was going to do anything to celebrate—she supposed after living with her mother's fanatical obsession with Klingon mythology for a decade of marriage that the Klingon calendar might be permanently embedded in his mind—and she assured him that she did not, in fact, celebrate any Klingon holidays. Nicki had offered to replicate some gagh and bloodwine; she pointed out that gagh was still alive and therefore didn't replicate accurately, and she had yet to find a replicated bloodwine that was anywhere near palatable. Besides, gagh was an everyday food; blood pie was the traditional dish on the Day of Honor, and the fact that she knew that made her irrationally angry at her mother.
She had done an hour of mok'bara that morning and had run through a few levels of her Klingon martial arts program after they shuttled back to Mars, so she was counting that as her official Day of Honor celebration.
"I didn't even know you still used this office," Glass said, apparently moving on from topics involving Klingon holidays.
She shrugged. "We had a battalion meeting this morning, so I was already here. And this is the only office space I have to myself." Between her, Glass, the ensigns, and the chiefs, there were seven people who shared the five consoles in the dry dock office. Sometimes, it was just easier to use her own space.
"Working on the thesis?"
She glanced at her console, still displaying the astrometics data from the Delta quadrant. She should have been working on her thesis—a complete technical manual of the Jem'Hadar ship—since Dr. Hospod, the head of comparative systems engineering, had just sent his revisions. She was just having a hard time bringing herself to care. "Something like that," she said.
"When's your trip to Qo'noS?"
"End of June," she replied. The current term at the Technical Academy ended on May 31st, but the trip was scheduled for a month. For as much as she liked to complain about running marathons with Sydney, she really enjoyed it and was looking forward to Tromsø. Or maybe she just didn't want her training to go to waste, but either way, she and Izzy wouldn't be going to Qo'noS until after their trip to Norway. "Maybe by then, I'll have made some promise with the cloak."
"Maybe you should wait to tackle that until you stop burning out replicators," Glass commented. "Cloaks are quite a bit more complicated."
"Every time you say something like that, it reminds me why you switched from engineering to intelligence," she commented. He grinned, but she wasn't joking. "I need your help with something that should be more your speed," she said.
"I'm not sure if that's a compliment or an insult."
"Take it however you want," she replied. "Your job is to interpret my reports into something Operations can understand. That's what I need your help with."
"Sure," he said with a shrug. "Shoot."
She took a deep breath. She really didn't trust him with this, but didn't know who else to trust. "Convincing Operations that it's worth pursing finding Voyager," she said. "Admiral Paris tried, but—"
"But looking for one ship in the Delta quadrant when we're at war against an enemy in the Gamma quadrant is hard to justify," he finished for her.
"Right," she said with a sigh. "So what do we give them to make them think that it's a good idea?"
"In other words, how will finding Voyager help us win the war," he said. She nodded. "There's always the obvious: scientific advancement has never led to worse outcomes."
"I'm pretty sure that was Admiral Paris' entire argument."
"They're looking for something more concrete, then," he said. She nodded again, and he thought about it. "We're looking at three different projects," he said a minute later, listing them on his fingers. "Finding Voyager, talking to Voyager, and bringing Voyager home. You can't do number two or three until you do number one." He lapsed back into thought. "Improved knowledge of the Delta quadrant when fighting an enemy in the Gamma quadrant is going to be another hard sale," he finally said.
"Right," Torres said with a sigh. "That falls under the 'better maps are always a good thing' camp."
"Bit of a stretch," Glass agreed. "Don't get me wrong; I love maps, but these aren't the maps we're looking for." He lapsed back into thought. "Your best argument is going to be the communications," he said a minute later. "The Dominion has the best communication network we've ever seen. Can we use that to talk to Voyager?"
She snorted. "We don't know where Voyager is," she reminded him.
"Right, aside from that," he said dismissively. "If you knew where Voyager was, and say they're 60,000 light years away in the Delta quadrant, can you use what we've learned about the Dominion communication network to talk to them?"
"You're putting the cart in front of the horse," she argued, stealing from one of Alicia's expressions. "We can't talk to a ship we can't find."
"What if we can use the communications network to find them?"
She rolled her eyes. "A communications network is for communications," she said slowly, as if speaking to a child. "It's not a sensor array."
"Why not?"
"You were an engineering major; you should know the answer to that!"
"Think creatively!"
"I can't change the laws of physics, Glass!"
He grinned at her frustration, then became serious again. "Think about it," he said. "How do you communicate with a ship when you know their approximate, but not exact, location?"
"You don't need an exact location to communicate," she replied, exasperated. "The comm signal isn't a straight line—" She cut herself off, and knew from the triumphant grin on Glass' face that she had stumbled into the point he was trying to make.
Kahless. They could use a communications network to find—and communicate with—a lost ship. Voyager.
"You have Voyager's approximate location," Glass pointed out.
"Within a few thousand light-years," she pointed out in turn. "We don't have any sort of comms system that can send out that broad of a signal."
"Which is where the Dominion's comm network comes into play." He was grinning like a little kid who unintentionally got the right answer on the spelling bee. "With a big enough network, we can cast a wide enough net—"
"The Dominion's comm network isn't nearly big enough," Torres interrupted. "They can communicate with the Gamma quadrant, but only because of the wormhole. Hell, I don't even know if they still can communicate with the Gamma quadrant, since we closed off the wormhole. To get across quadrants without a wormhole—"
"If we could do it now, we wouldn't be having this discussion," Glass said. "You would have already done it. We're talking about this so we can come up with ideas to convince Starfleet Operations that they want to create a team to look into it, and the Dominion's comm network is that key. We need to learn everything we can about that technology to make something like this work, and learning more about that technology will help us defeat the Dominion." He was grinning broadly now, as if he had just solved a complicated puzzle, when in reality, he had put pieces roughly next to each other with no plan on how to join them together. "Write an information paper on how the Dominion communication network works, and I'll write it up in a way that Operations will understand."
"And then?"
"And then, if they like it, you become the expert on Dominion communication systems." He shrugged. "Hell, you're already the expert on Dominion tech. It's not like they're going to give the job to anybody else."