Second Chances: Chapter 53

Stardate 51890
January 2375
San Francisco, Earth

Lt. B'Elanna Torres walked into room 2302 in Scott Hall—which she still thought of as Scotty Hell, the name every engineering major called the main building of the College of Engineering—and immediately stopped in the doorway. "This is the room for Advanced Communication Network Engineering, right?" she asked after a confused pause.

The room was packed. She had 27 cadets registered for the upper-level communications engineering elective, but there were at least 70 people in the room that only had 50 seats, and not all of them were cadets, judging by their uniforms.

"Sir, Cadet Caylor," one of the first classman cadets—likely an engineering major, based on his gold shoulders, and maybe one of the few in that room who was actually registered for the course—introduced as he stood up. "Sir, everyone knows about your contact with Voyager, and everyone wants to hear about it."

Torres sighed as she fully entered the room and headed toward the front. "You want me to skip twelve weeks of background and get straight to the punch line," she summarized. Caylor's cheeks pinkened slightly, but he nodded.

"That's about right, sir," he said, getting muted laughter in response, and she sighed.

"Take your seat, Cadet," she said in resignation. She glanced out at the students—audience?—in the small auditorium, which should have been twice as large as necessary, and instead had people standing against the back wall, and she sighed again. "Officers stand in the back," she said. There was a beat of confusion, so she explained, "You all have duties you should be at instead of listening to an obscure lecture at the Academy. If you're going to be shirking your duties, you don't get to be comfortable while doing so." There were some chuckles, but she had no idea if they were from the cadets or the officers who begrudgingly got out of their seats.

She waited until everyone was situated, and then began. "For those of you who don't know, I'm Lt. Torres, your instructor for Advanced Communication Network Engineering. Well, the instructor for those of you who are actually taking this class." She took a breath as she tried to figure out how to do this. She didn't like teaching off the cuff, but she certainly hadn't prepared a lecture for this. "Normally right now I'd be going over the syllabus, but I guess we'll save that for Thursday." She pulled out one of her work PADDs from her bag and synced it with the instruction screen.

She started with a map of the Dominion communication network and the theory behind using it to find Voyager. She didn't go into great detail—she'd do that when they got to the respective lectures in the course of the class—but also didn't dumb down the engineering. It was over the heads of the cadets, but they were the ones who wanted the story. And maybe being exposed to something a little over their heads will motivate them to learn the material.

The map expanded as she covered the discovery of the communication network that extended into the Delta quadrant and Lt. Cohen's method of mapping it, again not going into detail but also not glossing over anything, and how Lt. Barclay had helped her reconfigure a signal using the same principles.

That signal had been transmitting for over a week before they got any sort of response, and she went over how they modified the systems to receive that response and eventually, make contact with a ship 60,000 light years away.

She ended her presentation with what they wanted to see, less than five minutes of video of a conversation between a stranded ship captain and Starfleet Headquarters, between a husband and a wife, between a father and a daughter.

"We have ten minutes left of class," Torres said when she was finished. "Any questions?"

Not surprisingly, a few dozen hands went up, and she picked one gold-shouldered cadet at random, a first classman and potentially one of the students actually enrolled in the course. "Cadet O'Connor, sir," he said as he rose. "Sir, would this work qualify you for a nomination for a J. Bruce Award?"

She barely resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. Starfleet cadets were universally high-achieving, type-A personalities, and it seemed the engineering departments were even worse. She could still remember her classmates and their obsessions with awards, and how annoyed a lot of them were when she received the Scott Award—for the top engineering student among the senior class—as she didn't really care for accolades, one way or the other. The Scott was awarded before the winter holiday, so for the first classmen, it was now behind them and they had their sights set on the next award, which was the J. Bruce, awarded for achievements in science, technology, or engineering among junior officers, full lieutenants and below. "It would," she said, "if I didn't already have a J. Bruce."

You can't really fix up two Jem'Hadar ships, figure out how to configure them with Klingon cloaking devices, and write a technical manual during a war with the Dominion and not get a J. Bruce.

She picked another student, a compact Tellarite woman, who rose from her chair. "Cadet Kell, sir," she said. "How did you know where to look for Voyager? How did you know to look at all?"

Torres smiled slightly. "Someday, Cadet, maybe you'll have a high enough security clearance to look that up yourself." She didn't know why Starfleet Command classified any details about parallel universes, but they did. Her comment got some chuckles out of the room.

The next cadet she picked was a fourth classman, still with the red shoulders of a cadet not allowed to declare a major yet and probably lacking any sort of foundation for the decently technical lecture he had just received. "Sir, was that your husband's first conversation with your daughter?" he asked after introducing himself.

Torres resisted the temptation to shut the question down the way she usually did after getting personal questions at work; she did, after all, just show a room of several dozen individuals a video of Tom and Izzy talking, but that didn't mean she was going to give any more details than necessary. "She's three and a half and Voyager left DS9 four years ago," she said instead. "I think you can probably do the math on that one." That got a few more chuckles. "Does anyone have any questions about the engineering?" Torres asked, exasperated. Most of the waiting hands lowered, and she pointed to one remaining, belonging to a petite Xahean second classman.

"Sir, Cadet Ku Lia Ika Nu," she introduced. "Is it feasible to expect this expanded communication network to allow for continued contact with the Delta quadrant?"

"No," Torres replied, impressed that she had picked up on that. She shouldn't have been, in retrospect; Xaheans seemed to be universally adept at engineering and mathematics. "These kinds of communications networks are highly susceptible to astrological phenomena, and there are a lot of astrological phenomena over such a large network. The odds of having been able to get audio and visual communication were negligible, and it probably won't happen again." There were some murmurs in the classroom, probably as they tried to figure out of the whole lecture had been a waste. "What we can do is use the network as a mailbox, of sorts." She found another program on her PADD and sent it to the display. "We configure messages on this end and submit them. They travel through as they're able, and Voyager picks them up on their end, probably a few days later. And they do the same thing. We're collecting letters now for the first transmission, which we'll send tomorrow afternoon." She glanced at the chronometer. "That's it for today. We'll review the syllabus and have the first real lesson on Thursday, so those of you who aren't actually in this course might want to sit that one out."

She gathered her belongings as the cadets and officers filed out of the room, and looked up to see Cadet Ku Lia Ika Nu standing in front of her. "Can I help you, Cadet?" she asked as she headed for the door.

"Yes, sir," the cadet said, her inner eyelids blinking. "I was wondering if there is room at Pathfinder for a cadet researcher."

Lt. Torres stopped and frowned. "You're halfway through your second classman year. Don't you already have a lab?"

Cadet Ku Lia Ika Nu blinked again, and then made a face. "I've been working in Admiral Male's propulsion lab, sir, but she keeps wanting me to work on a dilithium project. Everyone wants me to work on dilithium projects. Just because I'm from Xahea doesn't mean that dilithium is my only interest!"

Torres understood the frustration. When she was a cadet, everyone thought she would be going into security; she was half-Klingon, after all, and there was only one other Klingon in Starfleet, and he was a security officer. It had been frustrating, to say the least. "Things are happening really fast over at Pathfinder right now," she warned. "A week ago, we had one engineer, two stellar cartographers, and an astrophysicist. We have ten times the personnel now and are still sorting through data that Voyager sent us to figure out what direction we're going." She studied the cadet and sighed again. "What's your concentration?"

The cadet beamed. "Propulsion, sir," she said. "Just like you were." Torres snorted; it's not as if she did much propulsion these days. At times, she forgot that she had been a propulsion major, as she had been focused on systems engineering for most of her Starfleet career. She wasn't surprised that Ku Lia Ika Nu knew her major; Xaheans were nothing if not thorough, and from what she remembered from the few Xahean classmates she had, had near-eidetic memories.

"We might have a place for a propulsion cadet, depending on what comes back from Voyager's diagnostics," Torres said. "The goal is going to be going Voyager home, which means we're going to be looking into novel propulsion systems. Probably not too much dilithium work in Pathfinder's future." Cadet Ku Lia Ika Nu beamed again. "Send me your CV and transcript, and I'll talk to Commander Harkins."

"Thank you, sir," the Xahean enthused. "When you will have an answer for me?"

Right down to the point; Torres liked her already. "I'll talk to him this afternoon," Torres promised. "I'll have an answer for you by the end of the week."

Ku Lia Ika Nu was practically bouncing on her feet in joy at the words, thanking her again before turning and leaving the lecture hall in an excited rush. Torres couldn't help but smile at her enthusiasm.

And then her smile faded as she realized that she had all but agreed to take on a cadet mentee. She was teaching three classes—a large workload for a graduate student; most full professors who taught full-time didn't do three classes in one semester—working full-time on Pathfinder trying to re-establish contact with Voyager and trying to figure out how to make their extensive communication work for them, researching novel propulsion systems that will allow a ship to travel 60,000 light years in less than sixty years, and raising a preschooler.

The last thing she needed was another responsibility.

She was still thinking about her conversation with Cadet Ku Lia Ika Nu and wondering if it would be possible to fit a cadet researcher into her schedule when she entered her office—an actual office, as the new Chief Propulsion Engineer of the Pathfinder Project—at the CRC. "Have you finished your letter for the transmission?" Owen asked from her doorway, making her jump in surprise.

"I've been a little busy, sir," she snapped, unintentionally harsh in her reply. His eyebrows rose in surprise. "Sorry," she said a few seconds later, rubbing her brow. "I got caught off-guard in class today. I'm going to do it tonight."

"Don't put it off too long," Owen said warningly, as if waiting until the night before it was scheduled to be transmitted wasn't putting it off long enough.

"Tonight," she repeated. "I'll get it done tonight."

He looked like he wanted to say more, but then thought better of it and gave a nod, resuming his course to wherever he was going before he stopped by, and she added another item to her ever-growing list of things she had going on in her life at the moment:

Learning how to be a wife with a husband on the other side of the galaxy.