Second Chances: Chapter 49

Stardate 51857
December 2374
San Francisco, Earth

B'Elanna Torres hated Christmas.

She had vague memories of celebrating Christmas when her parents were still married. She even thought she remembered one Christmas spent on Earth, but she didn't know if she actually remembered it, or just remembered the stories her grandmother told about it.

After John left, Christmas was no longer a thing in her childhood. Her primary and secondary schools still had winter break, of course, just like summer break, but Miral had spent those school breaks trying to fill B'Elanna's head with anything Klingon, and B'Elanna spent just as much energy resenting every moment of that instruction.

When she started at the Academy, her three roommates plebe year included two humans and a Betazoid. Reyana was just as confused about Christmas as B'Elanna, and Ruiz and O'Neill had spent several hours trying to explain it to them. The way they explained it, there was a religious component, but also a non-religious component, and the two didn't have anything to do with each other, but there were presents involved. Reyana had finally shrugged and said it sounded cute. B'Elanna still hadn't gotten it, but as it didn't seem to involve anyone killing anyone else and declaring a major victory—her gold standard for holiday celebrations at that point in her life—she just rolled her eyes and went back to whatever homework she had been working on. After Isela Torres had come back into her life, she had invited her then-teenaged granddaughter to the Torres Christmas celebration, but B'Elanna had declined, not wanting to see John or see him happy with his new family.

The year they had been dating, Tom and B'Elanna had passed on Christmas and spent the winter holiday on the beach in the Seychelles. To this day, it was still her favorite Christmas. She did enjoy seeing Izzy get excited about presents, but could do without having to figure out what to replicate or procure for everyone on her ever-expanding Christmas list. This year, she ended up getting a lot of gifts for the kids on Qo'noS. She figured that would be something different for them.

Christmas Eve found her the same place she was every day: in the communications lab in the Dominion Communication Group, running another set of experiments. There was a significant amount of signal leakage as they tried to increase the size of the communication network, and they were trying to figure how to stabilize the signal to prepare for long-range communication.

"I was hoping you'd be here." Lt. Torres jumped and turned at the sudden voice right behind her. Standing awkwardly close was Lt. Dakotah Cohen, the stellar cartographer on the Pathfinder Project.

"Cohen," Torres greeted, taking a step back to give herself more space. "Do you have something?"

"Yes!" Cohen said excitedly. "I was running some scans through the expanded network, you know, the ones that involve the new sites in Romulan space—can you believe the Romulans are our allies now? Wow, this quadrant hardly even makes sense anymore—"

"Cohen. The point."

"Right. Sorry, sir. The point. The point. I think I need to show you. Can you come down to the Pathfinder lab?"

Torres sighed, glancing down at her console, which was still running various permutations of the algorithms to stabilize the comm signal. There was nothing she could do on that until the program was done running, so she might as well see what Cohen had found.

The Pathfinder lab was one of the older astrometrics labs on one of the lower decks, with three work stations for the three officers who shared the space. Cohen had walked past her own work station and went directly to the viewscreen controls. A few taps of controls later, and a large map of the galaxy appeared. "Okay, here's the Dominion communication network, and here are the new sites in Romulan space. I ran a test simulation of—"

"Cohen."

"I found this." A second later, a series of dots appeared, stretching almost all the way from the edge of Romulan space and well into the Delta quadrant.

Almost all the way to the Starfleet insignia that represented Voyager's estimated position.

"What is it?" Torres asked, leaning forward as if being a few centimeters closer to the giant viewscreen would answer that question.

"It's a communication network. Well, another, communication network."

"It's huge!" Torres observed. "Who built it? Who operates it?"

Cohen turned to face her, her eyes wide. "Do you need me to find that out?" she asked.

"No, no," Torres said quickly. "Is it operational?"

Cohen nodded. "That's how I was able to map it. These nodes are all active. There might be other, inactive, nodes, but they wouldn't have shown up on mapping."

Something that Cohen had just said clicked to Torres. "How did you map it?" she asked slowly, her mind spinning as she tried to put the pieces together.

Cohen brightened. "It's something I came up with," she said excitedly. "I mean, I had a lot of help from the engineers, but—"

"Who?" Torres interrupted.

"Who what?" Cohen asked.

"Which engineers?"

"Oh. Uh, one was Lt. Barclay. He's a little…odd, but he's really nice and really smart. He did—" She stopped talking abruptly at the sound of the Pathfinder lab's door sliding opened, and then snapped to attention at who stood there. "Admiral Paris!" she all but gasped in surprise.

"At ease, Lieutenant," the admiral greeted with a nod before turning to his daughter-in-law. "I'm about to head home. Alicia wanted to know what time you and Izzy were planning on coming."

Torres made a face and checked her chronometer. It after 1300; she had worked through lunch again without realizing it. "I want to chase this down," she said. Izzy was on winter holiday from pre-school and was at daycare—honestly, Torres had no idea what the difference was between Izzy's 'pre-school' and 'daycare,' as they were in the same building and both mostly seemed to involve playing—and while she had several hours before she had to pick Izzy up, Alicia had made some comment about baking cookies on Christmas Eve, and Izzy was looking forward to it. "Can you pick Izzy up from day care? I'll meet you at your house in a few hours."

"Don't lose track of time," he said warningly. She nodded in concession.

Cohen still looked halfway terrified after the doors slid closed behind Admiral Paris. "Where can I find Lt. Barclay?" Torres asked her, hoping to get her back on track.

"Oh!" Cohen exclaimed. "He's in the engineering section. Fifth deck."

"Thanks," Torres replied. She paused, then added, "Merry Christmas."

"Oh, I'm Jewish, sir," Cohen replied. Torres stopped and frowned.

"I have no idea what that means," she admitted, and Cohen smiled.

"Sometimes, neither do I," she said cheerfully. "I don't celebrate Christmas, but thank you," she added. "Merry Christmas to you, though."

Torres made her way up to the fifth floor, still shaking her head slightly at the exchange, and after asking a few people where she could find Lt. Barclay, was directed to a holodeck. She didn't know what kind of program it was, but found an officer standing in front of a console of some sort. "Lt. Barclay?" she asked, and he looked up in surprise.

"Y-yes, that's me," he stammered. "You must be Lieu-lieutenant Torres," he continued. "Lieu-lieutenant Paris' wi-wife."

She blinked in surprise; she hadn't been introduced as Tom's wife since the Voyager memorial almost two years before, and had never been introduced as such outside the context of Voyager. "That's right," she said slowly.

"S-sorry," he said quickly. "I-I didn't m-mean to m-make it-it awkward—"

"Lieutenant," Torres interrupted. "You helped Lt. Cohen run a test of a communications network. I was wondering if you could explain how you were able to produce a signal that didn't degrade."

"Oh!" he said, brightening. "I-I will show you. Computer, change program to-to Barclay Gamma-8."

His stutter went away as soon as he started as he started talking about something he knew about, and for the next few hours, it took everything Torres had to keep up. She knew more about how Dominion communications worked than anyone else in Starfleet, but there was a lot to communication engineering that she didn't know, and Lt. Barclay was giving her a crash course in all of it at once.

Probably a good thing; one of the classes she would be teaching at the Academy in the upcoming semester was Advanced Communication Network Engineering.

Sending a diagnostic signal through a network was almost nothing like two-way communication, but she was starting to see ways she could apply the same methods he used to open up a channel. Maybe through the whole expanded network they had built from Dominion tech.

And maybe all the way through that, and through the other network they had just found. And to where Voyager might be.

Torres was back at her console when Owen commed. *Alicia saved you some dinner,* he said as a greeting. *And Izzy's made some cookies.*

"SoS," B'Elanna replied, checking her chronometer. It was far from the first time she had lost track of time, but Izzy had been looking forward to Christmas, and she had wanted to spend the time with her. "I think I have something, Owen," she said. "I just need another hour to modify the signal."

*You might have some what?* he asked, and she realized that she had been doing all of this without him even knowing about Lt. Cohen's findings.

"I'll explain as soon as I get to your house," she promised. "If this works, Owen… This could be the best Christmas ever."

She finished within the hour, as she estimated, and then programmed a repeating, encrypted message with instructions on how to respond. After programming her PADD to receive Pathfinder data, and instructing the crewman on staff duty to comm her immediately if a response came through, she beamed over to the Paris house.

Over a glass of whiskey, she explained the communication network Lt. Cohen had found, the test signal Lt. Barclay had transmitted, and her own repeating message that she had modified. "If they're within four light years of any of those stations, they should be able to detect it."

She was buzzing with excitement, but every hour that went by without a notification on her PADD or a comm from the Communications Research Center dulled that excitement a little more. By the time the extended Paris family had gathered for Christmas breakfast and presents the next morning, she was merely hopeful, her frequent checks of her PADD becoming more and more desperate with each present that was opened.

After a long morning at the Parises, it was time for her and Izzy to beam over to her uncle Carl's house in Arizona for the Torres Christmas dinner. She had crashed hard from that buzz of excitement, leaving her feeling dejected, and putting up with her father and the relatives she only knew peripherally was the last thing she wanted to do. She liked most members of the Torres family individually, but when they were all together, it was a bit much. She knew how this would go: Carl's wife Stacy would be overly kind to make up for the awkward feeling of distance she had in that family; Elizabeth would bring her latest girlfriend, getting her hopes up about meeting the family and what that meant about the future of the relationship, only to have Elizabeth dump her coldly and suddenly in another month or so; Dean would go on one of his rants about women who didn't pay attention to him; Michael would be embarrassed by both of his older siblings and make an excuse to leave as soon as dessert was finished; John would participate in the conversation for the first half of the afternoon, and then find a seat on a couch and read a PADD; and Navi would try her hardest to keep Izzy entertained in a house where there were no other children.

But it was Christmas, and Navi would be disappointed if they didn't make an appearance, so despite her sour mood and dour predictions of the afternoon, off to Arizona they went.

She knew she was too harsh on her family, knew that she was judging the whole lot by her father's actions, but knowing that didn't stop her from doing it.

And Christmas came and went with a signal repeating itself half of the galaxy away, its message remaining unanswered.