Second Chances: Chapter 78

A/N: I'm not good at making up engineering technobabble; apologies for the awkward sentences where I try.

Stardate 54016
May 2377
San Francisco, Earth

Cadet Yuiv was leading the discussion in Theoretical Propulsion, which meant that Lt. B'Elanna Torres, along with the other eleven cadets, were mainlining whatever caffeinated beverages they could get their hands on in hopes of keeping up.

To say that the young Andorian was enthusiastic about the material was an understatement. The fact that they were on the final block—singularity travel—the subject matter that Yuiv had spent the last year living and breathing, made her that much more enthusiastic. And when she was enthusiastic, she talked even faster than usual.

She was smart, a great engineering physicist and Torres was glad to have her on the Pathfinder team, but she was not a good teacher.

"The deployment of a subspace tensor matrix through the deflector array requires a magneton—" She stopped talking abruptly, her antennae sticking straight up before resting flat against her head, her eyes narrowing as they fixed down on her station on the table.

"Yuiv?" Torres asked after several seconds had gone by. Yuiv's eyes were still down on the table, darting quickly from one display to another and back again. She didn't say anything, her eyes still moving back and forth. From somewhere, her stylus had appeared, now out as she furiously began scratching out equations in longhand, the way she preferred. "Yuiv!"

When she still didn't get a reply from the cadet, Torres switched her table monitor to view what Yuiv was working on. It was the math she had been presenting, but she had circled one of the variables and was writing more equations in the margins, the numbers and letters appearing quickly in her small and imprecise handwriting, Andorian characters appearing along with the Standard, the way they did when Yuiv was working too fast to keep them straight. "Ghee!" Yuiv finally exclaimed. Torres recognized that one; it was an Andorian deity. Yuiv wasn't religious—she used it as an expletive, usually when she was upset.

And then Torres saw it. "Kahless," she muttered.

"We missed it," Yuiv said, her eyes finally rising from the table to meet Torres', her antennae again straight up from her head, a sign of barely-controlled panic. "The deflector array—"

"Yuiv," Torres said, trying to keep her voice as calming as possible, even though she felt like she was about to jump out of her skin. She wanted to run back to her lab and run the equations and the permutations and figure out how, after years of preparing for this, could they miss something so big, so close to deploying the singularity drive to get Voyager home.

"This could cause a black hole that would destroy sectors of space!" Yuiv exclaimed.

"Yuiv," Torres repeated, more firmly this time. "We still have twenty minutes of class. Please finish your lesson. We'll go back to Pathfinder after class and work on this."

"But—"

"Nothing is going to change in twenty minutes," Torres said. Yuiv frowned, but then slowly nodded. When she resumed her lesson, her voice was muted and distracted, none of the excitement she had had previously evident, clearly just trying to get through the lesson as quickly as possible so she could go back to the lab and try to fix their mistake.

Try to see if their mistake could be fixed, or if it would be the end of the singularity drive. They had already had to shelf the transwarp project; she didn't want to put this one away, too. Not when they were so close.

As soon as class was over, Torres commed Navi and told her that she was cancelling on lunch, cancelled her office hours, and then she and Yuiv ran from Scott Hall to the CRC. "Get started on the calculations," Torres instructed Yuiv as they strode into the lab. "I'll comm the Curie and tell them to hold off on any experiments until we get this straightened out. And I'm going to see if Swanwick can come in lend us a hand." The now-lieutenant, jg had left Pathfinder when he had been promoted and was now running a lab at the Daystrom Institute, one of the labs that Yuiv was hoping to be rotating through, if she was approved to go straight into a PhD program after graduating in a year. It was rare that Starfleet allowed its officers, especially its engineers, to go straight into graduate school without a utilization tour first, but Yuiv was working on impressing the right people in the right places, and Daystrom was trying to see what strings could be pulled to get her assigned there to begin her graduate studies.

Cadet Shava had Founding of the Federation from 1300 to 1500, so Torres left a message with her asking her to come in when class was over as she waited for the comm to the Curie to connect. If the issue was the deflector array, as Torres suspected, she needed Shava's eyes on it, as Shava had just finished reviewing all components of the array, where each had come from, how they were connected, and what each had the potential to do. *Lt. Torres,* Captain Mancuso said pleasantly when the comm connected. *I wasn't expecting to hear from you today.*

"I wish it was good news, Captain," Torres replied. "Or even a social call. We discovered an error in the deflector settings. We're working on it now, but until we get it straightened out, you should put your experiments on hold."

*Understood, Lieutenant,* he replied. *Thanks for the heads up. Keep us in the loop, and don't hesitate if you need anything. Ensign Nu is doing great, by the way.*

Torres smiled. "Of course she is," she replied. "Thanks, Captain. I'll let you know as soon as we know anything."

Lt. Swanwick came over, and while Torres considered herself to be pretty well-versed in everything that was going on in the propulsion section of Pathfinder, he and Yuiv immediately went more in depth into the physics than she could come up with if she tried, and it took everything she had just to keep up with the seemingly endless streams of equations and calculations they scrawled on the monitors, and she wasn't even sure what language they were speaking.

Shava came over as soon as her class was over, and while Swanwick and Yuiv continued with their calculations, Torres and Shava got started on the deflector. "We need to know everything about that deflector array," Torres said. "Every relay, every node, every piece of tech that is even remotely connected to the deflector."

They took that to the holodeck so they could actually see and touch everything they needed to, and in all of the excitement, Torres lost track of time until she got a comm. *Mom, where are you?* Izzy demanded.

"Hey, Izzy," Torres said with a sigh. She can't believe she forgot to tell her five-year-old where to find her. "I'm sorry, I'm at Pathfinder. Come on over here."

*Okay,* Izzy said cheerfully, and then closed the channel. A few minutes later, Izzy checked in, changed into her flight suit, watched videos from her previous flight practice, and then walked herself over to flight practice, and Torres took a few seconds to wonder when her daughter had become grown-up enough to do any of that.

And then she immediately got back to what they were doing and she again lost track of time, and the next thing she knew, Izzy was back at Pathfinder after flight practice. "I can't go home yet, Izzy," she said with a sigh. "I'm probably going to be here all night."

Izzy frowned, then shrugged. "Okay," she said, and turned toward the door.

"Wait," Torres said. "Where are you going?"

"Home," Izzy said, as if that was obvious, and Torres laughed. For as grown-up as Izzy seemed at times, she was still a five-year-old, and five-year-olds didn't go home alone.

"Nice try," Torres said. She checked her chronometer; Kajsa should be done with track practice. She didn't know how exactly she had found herself with an almost-17-year-old who pretty much lived with them, but for evenings such as this, it was pretty handy. She sent a text comm to Kajsa asking her to come by and pick up Izzy. "Kajsa's going to take you home. Do you want to wait for her here or in my office?"

Kajsa showed up twenty minutes later, still in her Tucker track suit over her practice uniform. She had started running track the year before to work on her sprints for Parrises Squares, and had surprised herself by being a very good hurdler. She had run the marathon in Chile with B'Elanna, Sydney, and Navi in December—Sydney had talked Navi into it as training for the Academy Marathon in the spring, and Navi talked Kajsa into it as preparation for her own Academy Marathon in a few years. Kajsa had hated it, and now was hoping to make it onto the Academy's track team, which would exempt her from the marathon. Coach Ulshanov was interested, but for as good as Kajsa was on the hurdles for a secondary school student, she wasn't quite at the collegiate level. He asked B'Elanna to show her a few things on the pole vault; he was always looking vaulters, and B'Elanna knew that if she could get Kajsa over three meters, she'd have a spot on the team. B'Elanna just needed to get her out there and show her how it was done. Assuming she still remembered how to vault.

And assuming she ever had the time.

"What time is bedtime?" B'Elanna asked Izzy before they left.

"Twenty hundred in Hawaii," Izzy recited. B'Elanna nodded.

"Let Kajsa get her homework done," B'Elanna instructed. "I love you, Izzy. I'll see you tomorrow."

"'Night, Mom," Izzy said, giving her mother a quick hug before turning to follow Kajsa out of the holodeck, leaving Torres and Shava to their deflector array.

It was around 2300 when Swanwick and Yuiv finished their calculations, and then the team focused on how to recalibrate the deflector array to meet the new outputs. They took a break around 0200; Andorians didn't do well without sleep, and Yuiv had gone from productive engineer to slow to almost delirious. Torres ordered both her and Shava back to the dorms to some sleep and both defied her and stayed in the holodeck.

There was an advantage to Barclay programming Voyager's entire ship instead of just engineering: crew quarters.

While they were sleeping, Torres went for a run, a hard, punishing run along the bay, enough to get her endorphins pumping and her brain to slow down enough to focus on the problem at hand.

They had figured out where they had erred and had rerun the calculations. All they had to do now was figure out how to reconfigure the deflector array. And then the navigational array, once they made the adjustments to the deflector. And determined that the deflector could create a singularity that would get them to the right place. R&D would have to do a new simulator program for Tom to practice on.

They had been within three weeks of getting Voyager home. This would add, what? Four months? Five? A year? She didn't know yet, wouldn't know until they could figure out how to reconfigure the deflector array and figure out whether or not Voyager be able to make the same reconfigurations.

So say it was six months. That was nothing. A drop in the bucket, really. It had been more than six years already. So what that they had another delay; they had had several already and survived them all. So what that B'Elanna would start teaching another term in the fall instead of moving onto the next phase in her career; she liked teaching. So what that Izzy would turn six without her father; she had celebrated five other birthdays without him already.

Kahless, she just wanted this over with.

She returned to Pathfinder, showered, changed, and tracked her cadets down to the mess hall of the holographic Voyager, both sitting on the floor, their backs to a viewport. Gone were the disheveled cadets she had ordered to rest a few hours ago, their uniforms now refreshed and crisp, long silver hair and thick black hair both tied back in orderly buns, but the dark circles under both sets of eyes were enough to indicate that their naps hadn't been enough to restore them to full function. However, they were there and ready to work, and with only a few hours until their next meeting with Voyager, Torres wasn't going to push them away. At least, until Shava had to leave for class at 1000.

They were talking about majors, Torres deduced as she headed for the replicator to get a cup of raktajino. If she ever spoke to Barclay again, she would have to thank him for living in the program so much that he programmed functional replicators into the mess hall. "I'm still torn between Systems and Propulsion," Shava was saying. "I like the Systems work I'm doing here, but I feel like Propulsion is where the serious engineering cadets go."

"I was a Propulsion major," Torres said as she took a seat in one of the chairs. "But almost all of my assignments have been in systems, and I got my master's in Comparative Systems. You're not going to limit your career either way." She took another drink of her raktajino and waved around vaguely. "There's a real mess hall just a few decks away," she said. "Don't spend too much time on holodecks, or you'll start to confuse it with reality. Just look at what happened to Barclay."

"Who?" Shava asked.

"He was the comms lead before I started here," Yuiv informed the junior cadet. "He's the reason why the Voyager program is so detailed. He was living on the 'ship' in the holodeck, created a holographic crew and everything."

"Creepy," Shava commented. Silence fell over the three women as they all drank their beverages and nodded in agreement.

"How are your classes?" Yuiv asked Shava abruptly. "I liked some of those first-year classes. Founding of the Federation was my favorite class plebe year."

Shava shrugged a shoulder. "It's a little dull," she said, and out of the blue, Yuiv started chuckling.

"Can you even imagine?" She asked. "Do you think they had any idea that, 200 years after they formed the Federation, there would be a half-Klingon, half-human engineering professor, sitting with her Andorian and half-Orion, half-Romulan cadets on a holographic ship? Ghee. Where would we even be 200 years ago?" She took another drink of her likely-over-sweetened coffee. "I'd be an engineer in the Imperial Andorian Guard," she said.

"I wouldn't exist," Torres commented.

"I would," Shava said. "Orions and Romulans had been hate fucking for centuries before humans figured out warp." She leaned her head against the viewport, her eyes unfocused into the room. "I'd be working for the Syndicate, probably 'sold' a few times already at this point. Not much has changed on that front in the last 200 years. Makes for a straightforward final essay, though. 'Describe the societal changes that occurred as a result of the founding of the Federation.' I chose Orions. Biggest change: more targets for the Syndicate."

Even though she hadn't said anything obviously personal, those were more words than Shava had said about her life since Torres had known her, and she knew better than to address it in any way. "I did Andoria. Obviously," Yuiv mused. "I should have chosen something simpler. How do you describe the societal changes that happen after a militaristic culture makes peace with their number one enemy and joins a coalition of planets focused on exploration?"

"Klingon," Torres offered. She had hated the assignment and definitely didn't want to do it on Klingons, but her mother's teachings had drilled enough Klingon history into her head and she didn't want to research a completely different culture. "Biggest change: new enemies for new wars." It was much more complicated than that; having a new enemy in the Federation had united the factions on Qo'noS and kept them from fighting each other.

She put down her mug and stood from her seat. "C'mon," she said, waiting for her cadets to make their way to their feet. "Back to Engineering to get on this deflector array."