Disclaimer: You don't really think I own any of the Star Trek stuff, do you? I only am responsible for original characters and the story itself.
Author's note: I'm going to try and finish this story up in time to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year.
Without even looking in the direction of her Chief Medical Officer, Captain Ezri Dax ordered, "Todd, report…now."
"First thing, I'm really surpr…"
Dax turned and glared at her CMO, "Todd, get to…"
He finished her sentence, "Get to the point, got it. I adjusted the phase thingies to the specific variant of the aliens from Voyager's experience in the Delta Quadrant, and it worked. Unless I'm much mistaken, this is the very same alien species."
After the shock wore off, which only took milliseconds, Ezri looked to her First Officer, "Icheb, don't take this the wrong way, but I am beginning to regret having you on my ship."
Icheb, who on occasion, still struggled with the concept of humor, wasn't sure if his Captain was serious or not. At the Captain's next remark, he knew that struggle must have shown on his face. "I'm kidding, Icheb, really, it was a joke, a bad joke, but a joke nonetheless." She turned her attention back to Todd, "Now, Todd, how did they handle these aliens on Voyager?"
"Well, um, Captain Janeway drove Voyager into the gravity well between two pulsars. I don't think that will work for us."
After a moments silence during which Captain Dax was obviously reacting to the desperate measures to which Janeway had been driven in order to rid her ship of these aliens. "Let's hope we don't have to do anything that drastic here."
While Todd and Ezri had been speaking, Icheb kept watching the aliens on the viewscreen. They hadn't reacted in any obvious way to the conversation playing out on the Lindbergh's bridge, then he glanced down at the communication panel, the channel which was open to the station showed that the sound had been muted. Another reason they weren't obviously reacting to the conversation on the Lindbergh was they seemed to be carrying on an intense discussion. Both aliens were clearly agitated, but their agitation was not directed at either the Lindbergh or the beings in the Operations Center of Cold Station 12. As he was watching, the two aliens disappeared. Their sudden disappearance in the middle of what seemed to be an argument startled Icheb so much that he physically jumped.
As soon as the Srivani scientists gathered on their ship after evacuating Cold Station 12, they met in the conference room on their ship.
"I knew this was a bad idea, I told you this was a bad idea, didn't I?" The Srivani scientist was livid. "Exactly why did Research Command send us on this fool's errand, does anyone know?" Looking around at the other members of the research team, it was obvious by the scowls on their faces, she wasn't the only being questioning their governing body for sending them on this particular mission. The most obvious reason would be revenge, Research Command had been highly upset at the loss of a ship when their species first encountered humans in the Delta Quadrant which was the Srivani's home territory. The problem with revenge as a motivating factor for sending them on this mission was that none of the people on this team had been involved in that previous incident.
All the members of that mission were demoted and barred from active research, a terrible blot on their records which would never be lifted. The loss of one of the two ships dispatched on the research studying the crewmembers of Voyager was bad. Even worse was the stigma of allowing the subjects to detect their presence on the human ship. This was a breach of their most sacred research directive, the subjects were never to learn of the Srivani's presence, ever.
As a result of this disastrous first contact, Research Command was determined to finish the research which had to be abandoned. When word came to them that several ships from the Delta Quadrant were going to use a Borg transwarp corridor to again make contact with the humans in the human's home territory of the Alpha Quadrant, Research Command had scrambled to get a team ready to follow those ships into the Alpha Quadrant. They hadn't really given the research team a clear idea of how they were to extract themselves from the mission when it was completed, which had caused concern among the research team. The team, to a man, seemed to believe that Research Command wasn't truly concerned they would ever be able to return to the Delta Quadrant to deliver the results of their mission.
But why? What had these scientists done to incur Research Command's wrath? Or were they simply expendable resources.
The youngest Srivani spoke up, at first his voice was quiet, but as the situation sank in, his voice became stronger, "Um, I say we terminate our experiments and using the transwarp corridor, go back home. There really is no point to these experiments and I for one am not willing to give my life on this pointless enterprise, or to be trapped so far from home." The speaker's words caused a wave of approving nods and utterances around the conference table.
Note: The species name, Srivani, while not mentioned in the episode Scientific Method, it was apparently in the original script. This is according to the Star Trek Encyclopedia.