The flight sickbay was bustling with activity, with the last of the pilots waiting for their flight physicals and the physicians trying to finish those while getting ready for their upcoming mission to the Zeva V. Standing just inside the sliding doors, Captain Harry Kim could barely hear himself think over the din of equipment moving and people shouting questions and answers across the space. If this was what it was like on a daily basis, he didn't know how anybody could work there a full shift and stay sane. Then again, thinking of some of the Starfleet physicians he knew and had known--including the one he had been married to--maybe they weren't all that sane to begin with.
"Abbey," he called out, seeing a flash of blond hair over a ridged forehead.
"I'm a little busy right now, Captain," she replied, not pausing as she traded one PADD for another. She scrolled through the data with a frown on her face. "Crewman," she called out to a nearby medic. "We're going to need at least twice as much anesthizine. The anetrizine isn't going to do much."
"What's the difference?" he asked.
"The pharmacokinetics," she replied, already moving on to the next PADD. "Anetrizine is a prodrug anesthetic. In humans, it's metabolized to its active form. In Zevians, it's immediately bound to abinium, which is a protein found in their bloodstream. Once in the bound state, it's inactivated. Anesthizine is the active form of the drug, and it's just different enough that it doesn't bind to abinium. It's one of the few anesthetics effective on Zevians."
"I'll replicate more right away." She only nodded, her mind already on the next task.
"Are you going to the surface?" Kim asked, following closely behind his niece as she moved through sickbay.
"Just as soon as we get the clearance," she replied, pressing her thumb into the PADD to confirm the contents of a storage container before moving on to another.
"I think you should be one of the three to stay," he said. She turned to look at him, her eyebrows raised and an amused expression on her face.
"Unfortunately for you, my commanding officers don't agree."
"I am one of your commanding officers," he countered, again following as she crossed sickbay.
"Actually, Harry, you're not," she said, stepping around him toward another storage container. "I looked into it. Doctors take orders from higher ranked doctors. Dr. Mallard is the top of my chain of command on this vessel, and her orders come from Admiral Delaney. In times of combat, flight surgeons technically fall into the Offense Force Alpha chain of command, which means that if there were an argument between Dr. Mallard—that's Captain Mallard, MD—and Captain Lopez about the utilization of the flight surgeons, Captain Lopez would win. I hope it doesn't come down to that. Anyway, I don't hear your name anywhere in there."
"I give orders to Lopez and Mallard," Kim pointed out.
"No, you don't," Paris replied. "Not technically. They listen to you out of respect because they're on your ship, but you're not in either of their chains of command." She paused to scroll through the contents of another container on a PADD before glancing back up at him. "Listen, Harry, I appreciate that you're trying to keep me safe, but stop. Everyone needs to stop thinking I'm going to break if somebody looks at me the wrong way. I am a Starfleet officer. Start letting me act like one." She scanned through the crowds in the small space again. "Crewman!" she called out. "What were you planning on treating with these antibiotics? Pneumonia? We're going to need coverage for wound infections. Tieriglian, gantromycin, lipinem, quatrocyclotinidine, and anobactrim."
"Aye, sir."
She turned back to Kim. "I'm not a kid anymore," she said in a low voice before turning away.
"No," Kim said softly as she began barking orders to another medic, her gait stiff with purpose. "No, you're not."
---
After they loaded their supplies onto the runabout and before they got the clearance to head down to the surface, the seventeen field-trained physicians watched the battle from the viewscreens of the runabout while planning their setup. "They're like mosquitoes around a vat of bloodwine," Dr. Paris muttered, watching the tactical display of the fliers around the larger Nygleian ships. "How many do we have out there?"
"A thousand," Dr. Stanford, one of the junior flight surgeons, replied. He grinned over at her. "Lots of bloodwine at your house growing up, Paris?"
"Only after a particularly honorable killing," she replied sweetly. "It looks like we're doing well."
"It's not as if the phasers on the fliers are any less effective just because they're coming from a smaller ship," Dr. Jackson said absently, studying the planetary display. He tapped the monitor. "Most of the fire seems to be concentrated here, in this urban area of the southwestern continent. That's where we'll send the largest group. There's a stadium that will serve as a good site for a field hospital. Paris, Kellogg, and Salvon, you're with me. Right now, I'm looking at five other sites." He pointed out the tentative sites on the display, assigning physicians to each.
"Our fliers are pushing the Nygleians away from the planet," Stanford said, pointing at the tactical display. It seemed to be centimeter by centimeter, but the Nygleians were slowly moving further away from Zeva V, their photon charges to the surface not impacting as often. It looked like the part of the battle involving the planet would soon be coming to a close.
*Kirk to the Nile. You are cleared for takeoff.*
"That's our cue," Jackson said. He turned in his seat toward the pilot. "Get us down there, Ensign."
---
Lt. Marjorie Shin glanced over at the figure hunched over the short coffee table in the engineering lounge, a PADD in his hand and an empty mug of coffee in front of him. Quietly, she crossed over to the replicator, then over to his couch, coffee in one hand and tea in the other.
"You look like hell," she said bluntly, handing over the mug of coffee. Lt. Nenyaht looked up in surprise, his hazel eyes bloodshot and out of focus.
"Thanks," he said sarcastically. He looked at the coffee and sighed. "I'm not sure more caffeine is the answer, though. I've probably had enough to power the warp core. That's what I get for trying to operate on two hours of sleep. I was never all that great at all-nighters."
"Two hours?" she asked, her eyebrows raised. "What did you do after leaving the bar?"
"Went to bed," he said with a laugh. "Then Abbey broke into my room and woke me up to take a look at her replicator. Her brother reprogrammed it before the Kirk left dock." He laughed bitterly, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head. He finally reached for the mug, using the motion to mask him kicking himself after that last comment. He should know better than to talk about one girl with another, no matter what the history with either. "And then we went to red alert, and I've been locked down in deflector controls since. I need to figure out a way to allow us to fly at maximum warp under cloak without burning out the deflector dish."
"I won't even pretend to have any ideas to help you with that," she commented, leaning back in her chair as she brought her mug to her upturned lips. Her slate-colored eyes narrowed slightly as she studied the other engineer, his broad shoulders still slumped forward as he studied the PADD in his hands, his olive-colored skin looking a bit more sallow than it had the night before. "I still cannot believe Admiral Janeway is your godmother," she commented.
He looked up, flashing a quick grin before his eyes returned to his work. "It comes with the territory," he said. She frowned at his words.
"What territory?" she asked.
"You know, my parents."
"Aren't they professors? There are quite a few children of Academy professors who have no connection to Starfleet admirals."
He chuckled. "Their pre-professorial identities," he said. She gave him a blank look, and he almost choked on his coffee in surprise. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?"
"No," she confessed with a small laugh. "Should I?"
"Janeway, Chakotay, Seven of Nine, Kim, Paris, Torres," he hinted, using the names from the stories they had told the night before. She just shook her head apologetically. "Spirits, didn't they teach anything about Starfleet during Federation history in your secondary school?"
"No," she said bluntly. "Starfleet service was not exactly an emphasis on my colony. As far as I know, I am the first from New Devonshire to join Starfleet."
He shook his head slightly. "I can't believe it. This could be the first time my entire life that this has happened to me." The doors to the lounge slid open, revealing the propulsion chief. "Commander El-Lachem," he said with a nod. "Stop me when you know what these people have in common. Janeway, Chakotay—"
"U.S.S. Voyager," El-Lachem said with a dismissive wave. "If you would like, Lt. Nenyaht, we could discuss the advances in the field of propulsion engineering that came from your parents' ship at some other point. In the meantime, I was wondering if you had a chance to run a diagnostic on the navigational deflector assembly."
"I ran a level four diagnostic, but it didn't include the force beam generator junctions. Nothing came up with that. Since we're not moving now, I took the whole system off-line to run a level one diagnostic. It should be done in about twenty minutes, and then I'll take a look at the results. I'll let you know what I find."
The small swarthy man nodded and half-turned toward the replicator before turning back. "Since you brought up Voyager, Lieutenant, I meant to ask you earlier if you happened to have access to the data from the latest transwarp experiments that Seven of Nine and Captain Torres have been running."
"I don't personally, but I can ask B'Elanna or my mother to include you in the updates."
"I would appreciate that, Lieutenant, thank you." El-Lachem nodded his head deeply before replicating a mug of tea and leaving the lounge.
"So what was so special about this Voyager that apparently everyone you knew was on?" Shin asked, returning to their earlier conversation.
Nenyaht shook his head slowly in wonder. "I can't believe you haven't heard about this. In 2371, Voyager was sent out to capture a Maquis cruiser, and both ships ended up transported to the far side of the Delta quadrant, seventy thousand light years from Federation space. The two crews combined for what they thought would be a seventy year journey back home, but through their innovation and what sounds like quite a lot of luck, they made it back in seven, making first contact with more peoples than any other crew in Starfleet history and defeating the Borg in the process. Didn't you tour the museum while you were at the Academy?"
"I went to the Academy at Psi Upsilon III for their biomedical engineering program," Shin explained. He seemed to remember that that particular satellite campus had one of the best BME programs in the Federation. "I've only been to Earth once in my life, for a BME conference on the San Francisco campus my plebe year."
As soon as she said those words, Nenyaht had a flash of memory, slate-blue eyes under a mop of platinum-blond curls, light brown skin flushing bright red in embarrassment as he entered his room early in the morning after returning from a parrises squares tournament. He blinked in surprise, wondering if the dark-haired engineer in front of him now could be that same girl Martin Coby had taken back to his dorm room years before. Before he could open his mouth and say anything, his PADD chirped, indicating that decks below, his diagnostic was complete. "I gotta go," he said instead, leaving Shin staring after him, a look on confusion on her face.