Second Chances: Chapter 75

Stardate 53259
July 2376
San Francisco, Earth

Lt. B'Elanna Torres smirked as she leaned against the railing. She watched the company of new plebes as she brought her coffee mug to her lips.

For as much as she had hated that day as a 17-year-old, she was loving watching it at a 27-year-old.

Kahless, had it seriously been ten years already?

Coach Ulshanov had given her a brutal tempo run that morning, and she was still feeling the ache in her legs as she leaned against the railing, debating the pros and cons of sitting a few meters away in the stands instead of remaining in her leaning position. Ultimately, she decided that standing would probably be better for her muscles than sitting, and took another sip of her coffee. "Morning, Lieutenant!" Cadet Dumlao greeted when she noticed her presence.

"Morning, Dumlao," she greeted the engineering major. Dumlao had been one of her more junior cadets when she taken Comparative Tech the previous fall as a third classman, much younger than most of her classmates. She had actually approached the cadet at the end of the term to ask if she was interested in working at Pathfinder, but Dumlao had her eye set on the more administrative side of engineering and declined in favor of taking the leadership track. "How are your plebes?"

Dumlao looked over the ranks of new plebes with already-evident pride on her face. "I'll get them there," she said confidently. "Well, I'll help get them there," she amended. "Cadet Vork is a strong leader."

"Think that little one in the third rank is going to make it?" Torres asked with a smile. Navi obviously heard the question and made a face at her. "She's a bit of a smartass."

"Plebe Torres!" Dumlao shouted. "Is this true?"

"My sister exaggerates, sir," Navi replied, which was not the right answer.

"Lieutenant Torres is one of the finest professors at this institution!" Dumlao replied, and B'Elanna smirked again. She was impressed with Dumlao; she had that 'stern leader' projection down. "If you are going to make it at the Academy, you have to learn how to respect your superiors! Now. Apologize to Lt. Torres!"

Oh, B'Elanna was loving this.

Navi did her best not to roll her eyes. "My apologies, sir," she said promptly. B'Elanna smiled and nodded her acceptance at the words.

"I heard you're going to be teaching Theoretical Propulsion this spring, sir," Dumlao said, turning back to Torres, and it took all of B'Elanna's strength not to make a face at that. She had hated Theoretical Propulsion as a cadet, because it was much more of a physics course than an engineering course. But that course had eventually gotten her a job with the TPG, for as short lived as that was, and with how much theoretical propulsion went into her current job, there weren't many at the Academy more qualified to teach the course than she was.

"I am," she said. "But aren't you a systems major?" Most who were interested in the leadership side of engineering majored in systems engineering, because it gave them a little bit of experience with everything. The only cadets who took Theoretical Propulsion were the propulsion majors.

"Oh, not for me," Dumlao said quickly. "I'm dating a firstie propulsion major."

"The more, the merrier," Torres said. There were only eight other cadets who took Theoretical Propulsion with her and she didn't anticipate many more than that when she taught it in the spring.

Dumlao grinned before returning to the company of plebes, and Torres chuckled as she took another sip of her coffee. She saw movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see T'Pana approach, a similar mug in her hand, although it was likely tea, knowing the psychologist's preference with hot beverages. "Just happened to be walking through the Academy this morning?" Torres asked innocently. T'Pana chuckled as she took a position next to B'Elanna.

"I know it's abusing my privileges, but I wanted to see it for myself," T'Pana admitted. The two watched in silence as Navi and the rest of her plebe company received instructions. "I remember my own initiation day," T'Pana said a few minutes later. "Twenty-one years old and definitely old enough to see this for the mind games that it is. I still don't know what I was thinking."

B'Elanna was surprised at the thought of T'Pana as a plebe, even though she knew on an intellectual level that she hadn't hatched as the lieutenant commander she had been when they first met. "I was 17 and don't know what I was thinking, either."

T'Pana smiled slightly. "I wish Navi believed me when I told her that she shouldn't be in a rush to grow up," she said, almost sadly. "But it's hard when you have as clear of an idea of who you want to be as she has always had. I didn't have that. I had so many false starts and detours and restarts. Even after I decided to follow my mother into Starfleet, I still didn't know what that would look like."

"I thought your mother was a counselor?" B'Elanna asked with a frown, and T'Pana smiled again.

"She was," T'Pana confirmed. "Which was why that was the last thing I wanted to be doing. Math was my first love and what I started to study before I went to the Academy, but my brain couldn't handle that level of calculation and concentration without shorting out. Moshe tried to talk me into joining him in the neuroscience department, but against my best intentions, I found the psychology courses much more interesting than the neuroscience courses, and I changed my major to neuropsychology in my seconds year. After graduation, it was on to get my PhD in clinical psychology. My mother still gloats." She chuckled and took a sip of her tea. "Thank you for inviting us to Izzy's birthday party," she said, abruptly changing the subject. "Has she taken off that flight suit yet?"

"No," B'Elanna said with a laugh. Tom had sent her the specifications for a flight suit in Izzy's size to be replicated, in recognition of the fact that, at five, she was old enough for the simulator division of the junior flight league. She had pretty much lived in it since, and spent the whole five minute allotment she had with her father the following Thursday talking about her first day of flight practice. While wearing the flight suit.

B'Elanna wondered if Tom had a single crewmate he hadn't bragged about that to.

She and T'Pana chatted for a few more minutes, until Navi's company was marched away to their next activity and B'Elanna and T'Pana went their separate ways, T'Pana to the still new and shining behavioral health annex at Starfleet Medical and B'Elanna to the CRC. She made a stop by the mess to replicate another mug of raktajino on her way to the Pathfinder offices and ran into Lt. Fallai, currently filling in as the head of the Comms team while they waited for Lt. Barclay's replacement to arrive sometime in August. "I have a question about cadet evaluations," Fallai commented as they headed for the lift, both with hot beverages in hand.

"Issues with your new cadet?" Torres asked. She had only had a few conversations with Cadet Sherman, the second classman communications engineering major who had inherited Riley's projects after he graduated.

"No, she's doing a great job," Fallai said quickly. "She asked for an interim evaluation from me to cover the time before Lt. Pang arrives, and I've never done a cadet eval."

"They're pretty straightforward," Torres said assuredly. "I'll help you when the time comes."

"Thanks, sir," Fallai said with obvious relief as they split off in their separate directions to their respective sections of Pathfinder.

After that exchange, Torres checked in with her own new cadet, confirmed that everything was going well, scheduled their next appointment, and finally headed to her own office. She had a message from Lt. Commander Andrews, the test pilot at San Francisco R&D who had been assigned as their liaison officer, about the data from the latest simulations, and scheduled a meeting to discuss the results and the next steps forward.

Progress was being made, enough progress that she was revising her timelines for getting Voyager home. If things continued on this trajectory, there was no reason to believe that she wouldn't be spending the summer holiday the following year with Tom.