=/\=
When he reached Engineering, a very important personage was nowhere to be found. "Where's Lieutenant Torres?" Icheb asked Freddie.
"Haven't you heard? She's in Sickbay, having her baby."
"What? Now? Then who's at the helm?"
"Tom Paris is, of course." Freddie tittered nervously. "I see you have your priorities straight! You haven't even asked who's in charge of Engineering!"
"Lieutenant Chapman, of course. He's been second in command here since we lost Lieutenant Carey," Icheb replied. Did Freddie think he didn't know that?
"Oh, yeah. Sure. You'd better check in with him. He's over there by Nicoletti."
Icheb reported to Chapman, who assigned him a station. And then, like everyone else, he waited.
=/\=
Icheb didn't have any access to his Astrometrics screen to follow this battle, but he didn't really need it. His eyes were fastened upon the gauges and warning lights on the control board in front of him. Chapman had assigned him to monitor Voyager's shields, along with the new ablative armor plating in the same location. A set of dials had been tacked on the upper margin of the control board, enabling him to keep a close watch on that new system, too. Icheb was aware if every blow the ship sustained because of the way the entire vessel shook each time, but the dials gave him additional information about the location of possible damage, as well as the shield strength percentage in the affected area. Most of the time, both shields and armor recovered strength somewhat after being struck, but the overall trend was downward. If the battle went on for too long, all of Voyager's defenses would inevitably fail; and then, as the saying goes, "That's all she wrote."
From his own internal chronometer, buried inside his cortical array, as well as the one at the top of his control board, Icheb knew the battle had lasted for less than an hour. It felt like days. Every time he lost his balance as a particularly on-target shot hit the ship, Icheb held his breath until he sensed the hull had held and not been breached. Icheb's fingers flew over his controls as he supplemented the automatic stabilizing system through his own actions. The shields and armor in his assigned area, on the port side of the ship, were holding up, but those on the starboard side were not. It was frustrating, since he had no knowledge of the captain's strategy and couldn't anticipate if one side was more exposed to the Borg's weapons than the other.
A line from the poem, "The Second Coming," by the twentieth century poet William Butler Yeats, kept cycling through his brain: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . ." He wished it would stop. He didn't want Voyager to fall apart. He refused to believe the rough beast, the Borg Queen, was slouching towards their ship even now. The admiral had to succeed. She had to.
Still, he kept expecting the call from the captain to come to the bridge or the shuttle bay, to ask him to lean forward and bare his neck for the hypospray that would turn him into an even more potent weapon than his parents had made of him; for the call to a final duty he could provide to those who had been so kind to him, who had rescued him from certain death many months ago. He'd enjoyed his life here, with an existence as an individual he could actually remember, unlike the time he'd spent growing up on Brunal, with a mother who had produced him for the sole purpose of sending him to deliver death to the Hive, and a father who may have loved him, but had helped her place their son in the path of the Borg a second time. Then, the sacrifice had been averted through the actions of Captain Janeway and this crew, but now he was prepared to make it happen, if necessary, to protect all of those he had grown to love and admire.
So he waited, until he heard the announcement that the last of the marvelous transphasic torpedoes had been dispatched towards its target. Once that last one was gone, he endured what he thought would be his last moments as an individual.
And he waited, and then he waited . . . and then he heard a ripple of surprise and stunned relief flow from one engineer to another as the word came down from the bridge: "We made it! We're out! We survived! We're home. We've come home to the Alpha Quadrant!"
Icheb carefully examined his control board. The shields were all holding steady, maintaining the same level as the last readings he'd observed a few minutes before. The ablative armor was still intact. There was no evidence of any more blows from Borg weaponry. The battle was over, and they must have won.
Wearily, he leaned against one of supportive ribs next to his station, listening to the cheers of his crewmates as they reveled in victory. They were home, but as far as Icheb was concerned, as Naomi had observed when they parted at her door, he was about to lose his.
=/\=