CHAPTER SEVEN
Lorana Jinzler led Voyager's command crew down one of the long corridors on D-One, staying to one side as speeder bikes raced past. They had just completed a tour of the changes on Voyager, which after a month of repairs and upgrades was covered in durasteel alloy patches and supported by an exo-skeletal framework secured to the turbolift pylons surrounding the central storage core.
The end result was a ship that only vaguely resembled the Intrepid-class it was at the beginning. The ribbed effect of the curved exo-skeletal girders gave the ship the appearance of a prehistoric anthropod such as a trilobite. The built-in Structural Integrity Field system had been supplemented on the outside with tensor field generators to strengthen the framework against the stresses of entering and exiting hyperspace, and relativistic shield generators had been installed to make sure that time would flow at the same rate on Voyager as it did on the rest of the Outbound Flight once they entered hyperspace. All of the engineers had agreed that having any difference in the rate of time flow between the two ships would not be conductive to the health of anyone involved.
"Jedi Lorana?" a voice behind her asked. She stopped and turned around to face Tom Paris.
"Yes?"
"I heard there was some sort of space fighter aboard. Is that true?"
Lorana nodded. "Yes, there's a Delta-12 Skysprite on D-Three. Why do you ask?"
Paris gave her a slightly goofy grin. "Well, see, I've always been interested in fighters. B'Elanna and I have been working on modifying one of Voyager's shuttles for a few months now to give it better performance, but that probably doesn't compare to one designed for combat from the start. Would you mind letting us see it?"
"Not at all," Lorana said as they arrived at D-One's bridge. "Who else would like to come along?"
Nobody raised their hand, so Lorana turned back to Tom. "Well, it looks like it's just you. The rest of you can stay here with the Captain or go anywhere you need to. We'll be in the hangar of D-Three."
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A short walk and turbolift ride later, they arrived in D-Three's hangar and Paris let out a low whistle as he saw the Delta-12. "Man, that thing looks like it's built for speed," he said, admiring its sleek lines and the red stripes that had been painted on its arrowhead-shaped hull. Apparently red paint stripes were indeed a universal concept meant to convey the fact that something was designed to go fast.
Then, as he completed his half-circle walk around the fighter, he couldn't help but notice the two huge cylinders that protruded from its aft section. "Wow... this thing must have some serious power. It's practically all engine!"
Lorana nodded. "It's one of the fastest fighters made. The Jedi Order was the largest customer."
"How come there's only one?" Paris asked.
"Outbound Flight actually wasn't supposed to have any fighters," she replied. "The Jedi Council sent a Knight and his Padawan along with us to try and locate a Jedi that had gone missing in the uncharted regions of the galaxy, and they were going to use this fighter to leave before we reached the uncharted areas. The Supreme Chancellor pulled them off at one of our last navigational stops, so the fighter was left behind."
"Ah," Paris said. "Do you know how to fly it?"
Lorana laughed. "Well, I'm not a crack pilot like Anakin, but yes, I know how to fly."
Paris had an expression similar to that of a kid who's just been given free run of a candy store. "Can we take it out?"
Lorana suddenly looked uncertain. "Well... I suppose. We won't be leaving for several more hours. I'll just let Master C'baoth know so that we don't get left behind by accident."
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While Lorana went to contact C'baoth, Paris walked up to the fighter and started circling it. The bubble-domed cockpit was a double-seated tandem configuration. When he walked behind the fighter again, he bent down to take a closer look at the two massive engines. At first, he'd thought they took up perhaps a quarter of the fighter's mass, but as he slid underneath the fighter he quickly realized that the turbopumps and other systems extended for almost the full length of the fighter. They had to be at least half of its mass.
He pushed himself back from underneath the fighter, rolled over, and picked up one knee so that he could get back on his feet.
"Master C'baoth's given us an hour," Lorana suddenly said from behind him, making him jump and hit his head on a protruding baffle. "Oh! Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you."
Tom grimaced and gingerly rubbed the back of his head. "It's OK, I think it'll wear off."
"Here, allow me," she said as she gently placed her hand on the back of his head. The pain vanished the instant that her hand made contact, much to Tom's amazement.
"What did you do?"
"Just a simple Jedi healing technique," Lorana replied. "Anyway, let's not waste time. I'll help you get into the cockpit."
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Elsewhere, Captain Kathryn Janeway rolled over on her biobed as if she had just awoken, and looked at the time. She nodded, propped herself up on one elbow, and looked around the Sickbay. It was empty, which was to be expected considering that they had not been attacked by anybody.
This was a routine she had rehearsed for nearly a month now, since they had confined her to Sickbay in the first place. And as far as she was concerned, it was insanely simple.
She tossed her legs over the side of the bed, and dragged an LCARS console toward herself. Switching it on, she accessed the crew roster and glanced at her own profile. No changes had been made to it.
Her next step was to access a section of the computer that seemed completely innocuous and did not appear to be connected to anything. While she was working her way thought a particular sequence of commands, however, her thumb slipped and activated the wrong thing.
The LCARS terminal beeped, the same volume as it had for all of her commands. However, to her the beep seemed to echo throughout Sickbay. She grimaced at the error, and focused even harder on the console.
The sequence was entered once again, more carefully this time. It took a bit more time, but as long as nobody called Sickbay for advice from the Doctor, she was perfectly fine. Finally, she smiled at her work: the LCARS terminal now displayed a detailed list of options. After looking the options over, she selected one and waited.
It worked perfectly.
Her biometric profile was now associated with that of a nonexistent ensign.
Janeway let out a deep sigh, one that sounded as if it had been pent up for several weeks, and perhaps it was. It didn't really matter; she stood up and stretched, listening to the joints in her spine crack. Then she walked toward the exit.
Or at least tried to.
Am all-too-familiar voice behind her spoke. "Are you perhaps going somewhere, Captain?"
Janeway spun around in reaction to the Doctor's sudden appearance.
"Captain," his voice took on a note of annoyance, "I did give specific orders that you were to remain here until I released you from my care."
Janeway dove to the floor as the Doctor suddenly brought a sedative hypospray toward her. As she did so, her elbow slammed into the hard surface of the deck, causing her to grimace in pain; she tried her best to ignore it, stretching out her heel to trip the Doctor. His illusory foot passed right through hers, and as she leaned backwards to avoid the hypospray she fell over the biobed, landing in an awkward heap on the floor.
It's so easy to forget he's a hologram, she realized as she picked herself back up. There wasn't even any point to trying to fight him.
"Computer, end program."
The Doctor disappeared, and promptly she began running toward the exit...
Only to have him re-appear in front of her path.
"Computer-" This time, he did not allow her to complete her sentence as he advanced, still holding the hypospray. She backed up, crashing into a tool cart as she did.
"End program!"
The Doctor didn't pause before he spoke. "I have isolated myself from the main computer, Captain."
"Thanks for telling me," she sarcastically retorted. "Computer-"
Janeway cut her sentence short and rolled sideways as the Doctor forcefully thrust his hypospray toward her again. She came up on the other side of the cart and grabbed it, using it as shield between herself and the Doctor.
"Cut all-"
He again thrust the hypospray toward her. This time, she grabbed the hypospray-that was the only part that wasn't holographic, after all-and thrust it away from herself. She heard the distinctive hissing as he activated it, but thankfully the drug only went into the air.
"-power to-"
She dodged another thrust with the hypospray, madly looking around Sickbay to see if there was something that she could use as a weapon. Her quick search only turned up several pillows.
"-Sickbay!" she finished. The lights promptly went out, but she could still see the Doctor, who faintly glowed in the absence of light.
Crap, she thought. But there was no time to contemplate her mistake, as she observed the Doctor come at her again. She grabbed a nearby pillow and flung it the approaching hologram, momentarily causing him to pause as the polyester projectile passed harmlessly through him. She started running in the darkened Sickbay-
-and ran straight into a biobed, knocking herself off her feet and dazing her for a moment.
The Doctor continued his pace toward her, the ever-present hypospray still in his hand. "Captain, may I suggest you return to your unit before you inflict further harm on yourself? It is difficult enough handling a psychological emergency."
Kathryn ignored his cautions and picked up a nearby medical cart with as much effort as she could muster. She then spun it around as fast as was possible, hitting the hypospray in his outstretched arm and sending it flying.
While the Doctor looked down at his empty hand in curiosity, she dashed out of Sickbay.
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As Tom climbed into the rear cockpit seat of the Delta-12, he was amazed at how much the cockpit looked like a higher-tech version of one of the World War II fighters that he admired so much. It even had a flight stick in the center!
"Put your headband on," Lorana instructed him from the seat in front. "We won't be able to hear each other unless that's in place; it's kind of loud in here."
Tom looked at the panels on either side and finally saw where the headband was hanging. He picked it up and, after a moment trying to figure out where it went, put it on his head.
"All right, I'm starting the warm-up sequence. Are you all strapped in?"
Tom looked down and noticed that he was sitting on a harness. He moved and pulled the harness out, then began buckling the five different straps into the center connector and pulled them tight. "I am now," he acknowledged.
"Great. Hangar control's given us clearance to move out."
The fighter picked up off the floor of the hangar with a slight whine as its systems ran up to full power, and then glided out through the containment field into open space.
"I love the visibility in this thing," Tom remarked as he looked all around them. "It almost feels like we're right out in space."
"Here, I'll pull around and get us a better look at Voyager," Lorana said as she swung the fighter around rapidly.
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The Doctor snapped back up in time to see Janeway exit the Sickbay. He briefly calculated the outcomes of pursuing his patient, but decided against it. Although a flying medical cart could not do him any lasting damage due to his ethereal nature, it was quite annoying.
Besides, it wasn't like he was the only being on Voyager. He accessed the central computer, noting that there were three security officers on Deck 5, then switched on the ship-wide paging system.
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Janeway was stepping into a turbolift just as the Doctor's announcement came over the speakers.
"Attention all personnel. This is the Chief Medical Officer speaking. Kathryn Janeway has attacked me and escaped Sickbay. She is seriously ill and needs to be returned at once."
She cursed silently and hit the control panel rather than using voice commands. The doors slid shut, blocking off the view of the corridor beyond, and there was the briefest of sensations as the pod began moving. It seemed like only several seconds had passed before the doors opened again. She cautiously and quietly stepped into the corridor, walking down it as softly as possible toward the door at the far end. Again, Janeway worked the control panel, and was rewarded as it slid open in response to her thumbprint.
She peeked around the door and then ducked into the shuttlebay, pausing to grab a hand phaser out of a storage locker. Once she had made sure that nobody was present in the shuttlebay, she looked at the deck.
After five years spent traveling through the Delta Quadrant, there was just one shuttle left. B'Elanna and Tom had managed to piece it together over the past several months from one of their wrecked Type-11 shuttlecraft, some of the few remaining spare parts and scavenged components from alien ships. Whatever was left had been fabricated using the ship's industrial replicator, although it had been hard for her to sign off on such a large expenditure of their precious antimatter supplies.
At least we won't have to worry about that now, she mused before cutting that train of thought off. How can we trust them to take us home? They wanted to bolt our ships together which would make us absolutely helpless and defenseless... They could take us back to their own part of the galaxy and we wouldn't be able to do a thing about it.
She shook her head sadly as her hand ran over the name that Tom had painted on the side of the shuttle. Delta Flyer... They hadn't even been able to properly christen it because she had changed course to investigate the Outbound Flight.
Janeway was startled by banging at the entrance, and realized that she needed to get out before they overrode the lock. She slapped the Delta Flyer's hatch release, then jumped in as soon as it was open wide enough for her to fit through. As soon as she was inside, she sealed the panel and locked it from outside access.
When she reached the cockpit, she realized that she had just made it in time as Tuvok and a number of supernumeraries poured into the hangar, compression rifles drawn.
With a sense of urgency, she began activating the shuttle's systems, praying silently that they hadn't overlooked any leaks in the hull or anything else that might cause a catastrophic failure. Then she sat down in the pilot's chair and reached for the touchpad to actually take the shuttle out... and discovered that there wasn't one.
"Leave it to Tom to build a shuttle that only he could fly," she muttered to herself as she wrapped her hand around the joystick. "Now... how does this thing work?"
Experimentally, she eased the joystick forward, and was rewarded as the nose of the hovering shuttle pitched forward, crashing off the deck plates and startling the security officers.
"Captain, your actions are highly irrational and are unlikely to have a positive outcome," Tuvok's always calm voice echoed over the comm. "I suggest you power the shuttle down and come out to talk to us."
She sighed and completely ignored him. I need to talk to Chakotay, not you. At least she might be able to talk some reason into her first officer... but if Tuvok had made up his mind, it would be almost impossible to convince him otherwise.
"Computer, open the shuttlebay doors."
As the doors began grinding their way open, Tuvok spun around before tapping his commbadge again. "Captain, I must strongly recommend you cease your current course of action."
"I can't do that, Tuvok." Just a few more meters...
"Computer, seal the shuttlebay, authorization Tuvok Lambda Seven Alpha."
In a panic, she slammed the throttle forward, spinning the Delta Flyer sideways with the stick while the doors ground to a stop. A moment later, the shuttle lurched as its wingtips scraped between the doors, and then she was out in open space.
Now the only question was where the hangar on D-1 was. Although they'd beamed out of it, she never really had a good idea where it was located. Janeway tapped at the sensor controls, trying to figure out which one of the five attached ships was D-1. Unfortunately they all looked identical, so she took a wild guess and plotted a course for the nearest one.
As she pulled about to line up the Delta Flyer with the Dreadnaught's hangar, a small, dagger-shaped craft suddenly came barreling out of the hangar and the Flyer's panel went wild with alarms.
"Warning. Collision imminent."
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"What the hell?" Tom exclaimed as Lorana yanked on the controls and the Skysprite skimmed just below the Delta Flyer. "That's my ship!"
"Your ship?" Lorana asked, slightly confused, as she put the Skysprite into a banking turn to follow the odd-looking craft.
"That's the shuttle I was telling you about, the one I've been working on for a few months now!" Tom exclaimed. "Someone must have stolen it!"
"Are you sure it's not just being used to move something?" Lorana asked.
"Absolutely," Tom replied. "It's not quite finished, and the controls are more like the ones in this fighter than the touchpads that standard Starfleet shuttles use. I'm the only one who really knows how to handle it." He was boiling mad now. "If they so much as scratch the paint..."
"Let me see if I can open a channel," Lorana suggested. "Let's see... I think these are the frequencies and codecs you guys use..." she murmured, more to herself than to Tom. "Delta Flyer, this is Jedi Knight Lorana Jinzler in the starfighter behind you. Identify yourself. Over."
When no reply came to her hail, she repeated it again on a different frequency, to no effect. She decided to try again.
"Delta Flyer, this is Jedi Knight Lorana Jinzler. If you do not acknowledge, I will be forced to open fire. Over."
In the rear cockpit, Paris blanched. "Hey, I don't want my ship destroyed!"
"Relax," Lorana replied. "I'm just going to fire a couple of warning shots ahead of it. Maybe that'll get their attention."
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Janeway flinched as red bolts suddenly exploded in front of her, causing the Delta Flyer to shake as it flew through what appeared to be plasma bursts.
"Shit," she muttered. There was no way she was going to shake her tail off in time to get to the Outbound Flight. Except... She grabbed the joystick and pulled hard to the right, sending the modified shuttle on a course toward the system's asteroid field.
"Warning. You are entering an asteroid field. The odds of destruction are greatly increased," the computer replied in a nauseatingly bland tone.
"Shut up," Janeway snapped. It complied, thankfully. The less distractions she had, the better; now, she concentrated on shaking the other shuttle that had pasted itself to her tail. Absentmindedly, she wondered why they didn't try to attack her.
She pushed down on the joystick, watching the old-fashioned attitude dials spin around like crazy, and looped around a large, slowly spinning asteroid. For a brief second, she thought that she had shaken the strange craft, but it immediately imitated her move and was back in pursuit.
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"They must be insane!" Paris exclaimed as the Delta Flyer dodged between several rocks. Lorana matched the move, and was rewarded as the fighter was peppered by a shower of dust kicked up by the Flyer's impulse thrusters.
"Hang on," Lorana said as she dialed up the inertial dampeners. While she needed to keep a feel for the fighter's movement, she didn't need Paris hurling his lunch at the back of her head.
"Watch it," Paris warned as a fairly large asteroid spun into their path. The Jedi was turning the ship almost before the words came out of his mouth; in front of them, the Delta Flyer vanished from view behind another large asteroid. "They went that way."
"I saw," Lorana snapped, quietly thanking the Force that this was a relatively slow-moving asteroid field. Even so, it was not without its dangers as a half meter-wide rock clipped one of the wings, making her shield indicators flash red briefly and sending the fighter into a slight spin.
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Janeway glanced down at the controls, then back to the asteroid field. Her brilliant plan was starting to look like a very bad idea now. Trying to pilot the Flyer through the field was very tiring as well, and she was getting jittery as her body demanded coffee.
"Computer, can you get a transporter lock on the Outbound Flight hangar?" she asked.
"Affirmative," the computer replied as cheerfully as ever.
Gripping the joystick, she spun the Flyer about to squeeze through two asteroids that were about to hit. There was a slight screech as one of the asteroids made contact, but no alarms went off and she let out a breath of relief.
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"Kriff," Lorana suddenly exclaimed as she pulled the fighter up hard. "They're not going to get out of that one."
"What do you mean?" Paris asked, craning his neck to try and get a good look at the Delta Flyer.
"Watch," she replied. "Those asteroids are going to close at the end. They're not going to have anywhere to maneuver."
To Paris, the field still looked wide open. "Are you sure?"
"Yes," Lorana said. "Watch, it's going to happen right now."
Uncannily, the asteroids were indeed moving together, forming an almost solid wall of rock directly in the path of the Delta Flyer.
"Shit!" Tom exclaimed as the Delta Flyer crashed nose-first into the largest asteroid, splintering the tough carbonaceous rock into millions of insignificant pieces before the shuttle's antimatter tanks ruptured. The ensuing explosion blossomed out, engulfing hundreds of nearby asteroids in gamma rays and superheated plasma. The Delta-12 bucked slightly as it ran into the shockwave, and Paris saw, out of the corner of his eye, the shield indicators briefly flash red again.
He swore under his breath as he watched the explosion dissipate. "I could have killed whoever did that... Do you have any idea how much work I put into that ship! Sonofa..."
It took a good several minutes for the swearing to stop.