Second Chances: Chapter 70
A/N: I'm posting a few hours early because I came up with an idea for a story related to Nothing Human, and I wanted to get this posted before I got distracted by that. Hopefully it'll be quick distraction and I'll be back to writing this one in time for next week's posting.
Enjoy!
Stardate 52902
February 2376
San Francisco, Earth
The most difficult piece of Dominion technology for cadets—and, a few years ago, Torres herself—to grasp, from a technical point, was one of the simplest—the warp coils. Once she had understood it, she couldn't believe it had taken her so long to figure out, but it required a paradigm shift in thinking about warp theory, it was that different from Federation warp cores.
Which was why she dedicated four full weeks of the Dominion Technology to the warp coils, and started the unit by going back to the basics; way back to the basics, all the way to the physics of warp theory, which she hated to teach and was pretty sure they hated to listen to.
She was halfway through a lecture about the generation of warp fields when the classroom door suddenly slid open, revealing loud noises out in the corridor and a cadet she didn't know at the doorway. Before she could ask the cadet why he had interrupted the class, he blurted out, "It's over!"
"Cadet?" she asked.
"The war!" he exclaimed. "The Dominion surrendered! It's over!" Before she could say anything, he had run off, probably to give the same news in the next classroom.
Well, there was certainly no going back to the various ways to generate a warp field after that.
She changed the monitor to the Federation News Network. *Today the guns are silent,* an admiral—Rose? Ross? She was a little embarrassed that she didn't remember the name of the admiral in charge of the Dominion War—was saying. *A great tragedy has ended. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph.* She didn't catch the rest of the speech, the stunned silence of the surprise of the announcement now over, her cadets all talking and cheering at once.
"Lt. Torres?" Cadet Wesa asked. "What does this mean for this class?"
"Well, I'm guessing today's lecture isn't going to happen," she said, leaning against the podium. "But we're still going to be discussing how Dominion warp coils generate warp fields on Wednesday."
"No, I mean, what's the point in learning about Dominion technology if we're not at war with them anymore?" he asked.
"Aren't you taking History of Communication Devices?" she asked. She hadn't been sure someone with his particular coloring could blush, but he appeared so. "Sometimes there's a value in learning things that don't have anything to do with winning a war. That being said, this might be the last time Dominion Tech is taught as a stand-alone course." They'll probably start including units on Dominion technology in the various courses it would fall under, such as warp drives, shields, weapon systems, and the like. "But don't think that that means that anything about this course is going to be any easier," she said warningly.
One of the pundits at FNN was discussing what this treaty would mean for everyone when Commander Ao entered the classroom. "Torres!" he exclaimed, his arms held wide. He surprised her by wrapping her in a tight embrace that lifted her off the ground. "You did it! My favorite little Klingon! You won!"
"I don't think it was me, sir," she protested. It seemed like the next thing she knew, half of the engineering faculty was in her classroom, all offering their congratulations. Most of them had deployed in support of the war themselves, in way or another, usually as a short stint in the engineering department of a ship. The cadets seemed to be getting a kick out of something, but whether that was watching the professors be more excited than they were or watching their professors embarrass Torres, she didn't know.
"I hope you cadets are paying attention." Admiral Nina Yasinski was not a tall woman, nor did she have a loud voice, but she still had one of those presences that people noticed, and the room got quiet at her entrance, the few cadets still in their chairs scrambling to their feet. "This is what happens when you make breakthroughs that change the course of history." She smiled at Torres. "My favorite protégé. I always told you that you'd go far."
Torres did accept a hug from her old mentor. "Thank you, sir. But I didn't make any breakthroughs that changed history."
"False modesty has never been your style, B'Elanna," Yasinski scolded. "Back when Lt. Torres was Cadet Torres, she spent more hours in my lab than the officers assigned to my lab," Yasinski informed the class. "She still has the record for most publications by a cadet, although she has been trying to get her own cadet to break that record. I wanted her to stay on and continue with the lab, but she wanted to get married and move to Mars to be with her husband." She looked back over at Torres and smiled. "And if I had gotten my way, you wouldn't have been assigned to fix up that Jem'Hadar ship, so I guess true love wins in the end." She smiled teasingly at Torres, who remembered the long discussions about her engagement and her career. She leaned in closer to her former protégé and spoke in a low voice. "Anton and I are having a party tonight to celebrate and we're having a lot of the faculty over. Blow off the party Alicia is undoubtedly already planning. You can party with them any time. Bring Izzy. Oh, and bring your cadet. I have some people I want her to meet."
Admiral Yasinski had the most impressive network in Starfleet Engineering. It was her reaching out to her contacts at R&D that found Torres her first job at Mars. "She's not interested in a research job," Torres informed her. She smiled slightly. "I've already tried to get her to stay with Pathfinder," she admitted, remembering her annoyance at Admiral Yasinski for the same thing.
"It's not a research job," Yasinski said. She winked. "Just bring her. It'll be worth her while." She turned back to the class. "Listen to your professor when she speaks," she told them. "Maybe she'll teach you something that you can use to win a war someday."
Admiral Yasinski and Anton Baishev, her long-term partner—not husband; "why get the government involved in a perfectly good relationship?"—both grew up in Siberia. When she decided that she was done with shipboard life and took a position as a project manager at Starfleet Corps of Engineers, they tried to settle in Siberia, but even though the day and night cycles were already off as far north as they tried living, she had a hard time orienting to the time zones when she was beaming to San Francisco for work. So, they moved, to a sprawling house built into the side of a mountain in northern Canada, directly north of San Francisco but with a similarly cold climate to what they, for some reason, enjoyed.
Fortunately, since she was so remote from anybody else and could build it herself, she was given permission to have a transporter station in her house, so none of her guests had to be subjected to the February Canadian weather.
Torres loved Admiral Yasinski's house, even though she had never seen it from the outside. Although her former mentor's specialty was warp mechanics, she had an interest in architecture, and had designed the house itself, taking advantage of the geography and scenery, large walls of transparent aluminum ensuring that the entertaining spaces had never-ending views of the mountains, valleys, and expansive northern sky, yet managing to remain warm and welcoming throughout.
A transporter tech in a dress uniform was manning the controls when she materialized with Nu and Izzy. "Sir, cadet, miss," he greeted, nodding to each in turn, an impressive feat considering that neither Torres nor Nu wore any rank insignia. The transporter room was usually unattended, but Admiral Yasinski often got a crewman when they were having a party. "Admiral Yasinski and Mr. Baishev welcome you to their home and request you join the party in the main living room, down this corridor," he said, gesturing.
"Thank you, crewman," Torres said. She knew which space he was referring to; it was impossible to miss it from the transporter room. Besides, she could already hear the party and it was easy to follow the noise.
None of Admiral Yasinski's parties had any formality to them, and this was no exception. There was no reception line; the host was lost somewhere in the crowd, which seemed to be mostly engineering department faculty, although Torres recognized a few first classman cadets and guessed most of the people she didn't recognize were engineering officers out in the Fleet somewhere and part of the admiral's well-placed network. A network which also included her, she now realized.
"Torres!" It wasn't hard to recognize Commander Ao's voice, and sure enough, the crowd parted to reveal the excited—and likely drunk—Andorian. "Good! You brought the little one! My kids need a worthy adversary. Too many pink skin children in this crowd. Come on, I'll show you where we stowed the children."
"Ao," Torres said with a smile as she followed him, giving Nu an apologetic look. "We are pink skins."
"No, you're Klingons. That's something else entirely." She rolled her eyes; between her and Izzy, they were more human than Klingon, but she knew the distinction would be lost on Ao. "Oh, you brought something to drink!" he said, noticing the bottle in Torres' hand.
"It's for Anton," she said. He had developed a taste for bloodwine when Admiral Yasinski—then Lt. Yasinski—had been stationed near the border with the Klingon Empire, and often lamented that he couldn't find good vintages on Earth. She had picked up a case on her visit to Qo'noS the previous month and was happy to share with people who could stomach it.
After depositing Izzy with the other children—despite Ao's words, no kids of any species were sizing any other up for battle—they finally found Admiral Yasinski. "For Anton," Torres said, handing over the bottle of bloodwine.
"He's in his study," Yasinski said. "I'll get it to him later." She brightened at the flowers that Nu was holding. "Xahean flowers!" she exclaimed, accepting the small bouquet. "I never did develop a taste for them, but my roommate on the Ptolemy was Xahean. She loved the orange ones. Come with me, Nu. The Marie Curie just happens to be in the system and my friend Jamie wanted to meet you." She escorted the cadet away, already peppering Nu with questions about transwarp.
The party proceeded to get even more crowded and loud over the next few hours, everyone in celebratory moods, despite the fact that each of the engineers knew that as engineers, their jobs would just be getting started in the aftermath of the war. Ao was leaving the next day for Cardassia with one of his cadets, beginning the assessments of what the Federation would be able to offer in terms of reconstruction. Commander Winters was visiting from Mars, knowing that ships would be coming in from all over the Fleet needing the services of the Construction Battalion. The Dominion had just recently pulled back from Betazed, and word was that there was a lot to be done on that front. There were rumors about how much assistance the Klingon Empire would be asking for from their now-allies, and Torres was sure that that was going to involve her somehow.
Torres stood by one of the transparent walls, her eyes fixed on the expanse of sky in front of her. It was a clear night, and through the hazy green of the northern lights, she could see the hazy white and pink of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. She did some quick calculations and realized that she was facing toward the Delta quadrant. Toward Tom. It was a little less than a year ago that she had seen the Milky Way in the clear sky for the first time since they had made contact with Voyager, and she had held Izzy on her lap as she had pointed in the direction of where her father was.
"Nu is a very bright cadet," Admiral Yasinski said as she took a position next to her former protégé. Torres smiled slightly.
"I can't take credit for that," she said. "She came to us that way."
Yasinski chuckled. "I was about your age when I had my first leadership position," she said, her eyes also out the window. "Deputy chief engineer. I've long since forgotten most of what I did on that job, but I remember the words of advice from the chief: always take a chance on those nobody else will. I had some pretty out-there engineers over the years—probably because I had some pretty out-there assignments over the years—and every time I watched one of those engineers come into their own, I remembered his words." They lapsed into silence again. "That's why when a plebe who wasn't even allowed to declare an engineering major yet, but already had two appearances in front of the disciplinary council, asked if she could do some research in my lab, I said yes. Do you remember what you said when I asked why you wanted to do research on warp mechanics?"
Torres smiled at the memory. "I said I needed something hard to think about so I didn't think about punching my company commander," she admitted. Yasinski also smiled.
"I had never been outside Siberia before I arrived at the Academy," she said, seemingly out of nowhere. "It's not as if we were ignorant of the world outside our small town or lacking the technology to go there. We just didn't leave. I find it difficult to explain why, other than to say that Siberians… we are different than other people. In this day in age, it is a choice to live there, to raise your children there."
She lapsed into silence, and then resumed. "I was eighteen when I arrived at the Academy and knew that I was different. My classmates were sophisticated, but soft. They had played sports when I had hunted and skied. They had done their primary and secondary school in classrooms and had field trips to museums and parks. I did most of my schooling in front of the fire at home and learned how to repair skis and snowcrafts and shuttles by taking them apart and putting them back together. I was the small little girl from Siberia who didn't understand their customs for how to speak and interact with each other. I was lonely and I longed for the familiar. I wanted to go home."
"Why didn't you?" Torres asked, and a ghost of a smile crossed Yasinski's lips.
"I took Warp Mechanics the second semester of my plebe year," she said as an answer. "I knew I was not ready for the class. I didn't even have all the prerequisites. I told myself, 'Ninoshka, you don't fit into this school and you can't handle it. When you fail, it will be okay for you to go home and finish your degree in Yakutsk and repair shuttles for the rest of your life.'" She smiled again and faced Torres. "I didn't fail," she said simply. "Those equations, that math… it was too difficult and I wasn't ready, but I fell in love with it. I would have done anything in order to unlock the secrets I found in those equations. So you see," she said, a twinkle now in her eye. "We both ended up marrying our nemeses from our plebe years."
Torres laughed. She tried to picture Yasinski at 18, small and quiet and alone, and couldn't. "Why hadn't you told me this before?"
"Because I knew how it felt to be that alone," she said. "I still remember that feeling, and I saw it in your eyes. We are not different, B'Elanna, but you wouldn't have believed me if I told you that. You didn't need someone to tell you that you would figure it out and it would be okay. You didn't need someone to tell you that you wouldn't be lonely forever and at some point, somehow, you would figure out how to fit in. I knew you would do that on your own. You needed someone to accept you for who you were then and give you permission to be a little bit different. You needed a lab bench and some hard math and some time, and I had plenty of those to offer." She smiled. "Someday, I hope you have a protégé who will make you as proud as I am of you. Now come on and come back to the party. We may be as awkward as any other group of engineers, but this is how we celebrate."