Disclaimer: I neither own the rights to Star Trek: Lower Decks, any other Star Trek intellectual property, or any of its associated media, derivatives or products. I do not profit from this work.

"AAAAARGHHHH MOTHERFUCKER!"

Carol's scream collided jarringly with the blare of the red-alert, causing the medbay officer besider her to hiss. "Hey! Watch it, feline ears here!"

"Shut up, T'ana! AGHH!" She hissed out several breaths and shot a ferocious glare towards the fork of her own legs. "Oh you had better be a cute as fuck kid!"

As another contraction rolled through her the ship shuddered, and light exploded in a crackle along the shields outside the medbay window. "That– looked like– a bad one," Carol huffed. "Shields've gotta be like fifty percent by now–"

"Don't focus on that, focus on getting that kid out of you!" T'Ana snarled. "Carol you've gotta push!"

"Fuck you!"

"Good! Use that anger and push!"

Gritting her teeth, the first mate squeezed her eyes shut and pushed until she couldn't take it anymore. "AaaaAAAGHH I can't believe I'm doing this in the middle of a firefight! If Alonzo's still alive up there, I'll kill him myself!"

"One more, Carol, c'mon! Give it everything you've got!"

And as the ship shuddered again and the shields dropped to what looked like dangerously low levels, Carol Freeman summoned all the strength she had left, swore to herself she'd murder Alonzo and T'Ana and probably a few innocent redshirts the next chance she got, and pushed.

Soon after, as T'Ana was cleaning the baby up and wrapping it in a blanket, the firefight finally stopped. A relieved voice crackled over the comms: "This is acting-first-mate Andarithio Billups speaking; the Bird of Prey is retreating. I repeat, the bird of prey is retreating!" The rest of the medbay and the injured crewmembers let out a cheer. "There's no need to worry about Captain Mariner, he's just on his way down to the medbay to check on the First Mate, who incidentally is giving birth to–"

"Oh for fuck's sake, who gave Andy the comms," Carol groaned, before the medbay doors slid open and she promptly forgot everything else. "Alonzo!"

"Carol!" Her husband sprinted over and staggered to a halt next to her bed; he had a welt on his forehead that was dripping blood down his face, probably from getting thrown around when the ship was hit, but he didn't seem to notice. "Are you alright?! How is–"

"The kid's fine," T'Ana announced, turning back around with a bundle in her arms. "Congratulations, it's a girl."

"A girl," Alonzo said, his face splitting into a grin as T'ana handed the bundle off to Carol, who peered down into it, somehow still dazed at the realization that she'd just had a baby despite all the effort it had taken to push the kid out of her.

And then her eyes landed on the baby's face, and the whole world went quiet.

She was so…small. Carol hadn't realized a person could be so small, with soft cinnamon-colored cheeks and a little button nose. "She's…tiny," she managed hoarsely.

"Yeah, she's a baby. Kind of their thing."

Ignoring T'Ana's snark, Carol gently ran a finger over the knuckles of the baby's impossibly small fingers. As she watched, the girl snuffled, and opened her eyes, peering up at her with huge dark pupils. "...Hi," she murmured. "I'm your mom."

The baby snuffled again, and wrinkled her nose. And then she opened her mouth wide and let out a wail.

T'Ana hissed in annoyance and clapped her hands over her ears as both Alonzo and Carol began to chuckle. "She's got some fight in her!" the captain teased, nudging his wife. "Just like her mom."

"Just like her dad, you mean." As the baby began to squall in earnest and T'Ana walked away, muttering something about needing earmuffs, the two new parents beamed down at their daughter. "So."

"So. What should we name her? We never came up with one we both liked."

Carol looked around the sickbay, and felt her heart swell, if possible, even larger. "Let's name her after the ship."

"The ship?" Alonzo said, startled, and then rubbed his chin. "Actually…yeah. U.S.S. Beckett Mariner. Kinda has a nice ring to it." He grinned again. "And with a name like that she's bound to end up in Starfleet!"

"Damn straight she is." Carol smiled down at the screaming baby. "Hello, Beckett Mariner. Welcome to the universe."

"Captain?"

Carol Freeman awoke with a start.

The hand on her shoulder pulled back as she sat up, looking around blearily; it took her a few moments to place the blinking lights on the console, the quiet drift of stars passing by them at a slow hyperspeed, and the oddly jittery feeling of cheap artificial gravity.

Then she remembered. Ah. She was on the Modesto.

"Captain," the gentle voice said again, and she looked back over her shoulder. The young orion looked back sympathetically, and Carol reflected with grim irony how D'Vana Tendi's changed appearance reflected their months of isolated space-travel: the younger woman's skin had faded to a sort of pea-soup green after extended weeks without even artificial sunlight, and her usually sharp half-buzz cut had grown out into a lopsided ponytail.

Carol hadn't looked in a mirror herself in months. She was a little scared to see what would be looking out back at her.

Abruptly her waking mind figured out what must have happened, and she whirled back around. "I fell asleep?!" She adjusted the radio, which was flicking automatically from frequency to frequency; the voices of different communiques and hailings from across the quadrant rolled in and out of focus. "How long have I been out?! We might have missed a distress call!"

"Only for half an hour. There were no distress calls, Captain, don't worry; Sam and I have been up for the last hour or so. We would have heard anything if it came in." Carol felt her shoulders slump as she exhaled, but the guilt didn't go away. If anything had happened… "Why don't you get some sleep?" the orion suggested kindly, and Carol tried not to bristle at the implication that she couldn't handle her own duties.

"I'm not your captain anymore, Tendi. And I'm fine, I can finish my shift at the helm." She turned the dial on the radio again, paused briefly on a distress call, and then dismissed it when she heard pirates. It wasn't the Borg, so it didn't matter.

"Cap– Mrs. Freeman, really, it's okay. Besides, your shift technically ended ten minutes ago." The hand lightly touched her again on her wrist, and she looked up. Tendi gave her that everything's-okay, bedside-manner smile that must have worked wonders back in the Cerritos medbay. "Seriously, go get some rest. You won't be any help to Mariner if you're dead on your feet."

Carol eyed her, and then sighed, unstrapped herself from the captain's chair with a tired nod, and stood up. "Alright, Tendi, you win. I'll take a nap. Thirty minutes, and not a second over, you hear me?"

"Of course, Mrs. Freeman." She was obviously lying, but Carol was too tired to care. She stumbled to the bunks in the back of the tiny three-man ship and collapsed onto the mattress. Within a few moments she felt her eyes drifting shut of their own accord, and had barely enough time to toss up a brief prayer to any god who was listening to drop her back in the dream of her family, happy and whole again, before sleep claimed her.

Up at the front console, Tendi waited patiently until she heard the telltale snores coming from the back bunk (Captain Freeman really was like her daughter, not that either of them would ever dare admit it), and then sat down in the cockpit. As she strapped herself in, she heard footsteps behind her and looked over as someone sat down in the copilot seat next to her.

"Hey," Rutherford yawned, taking a drink from his coffee. "So we're lying to the captain now?"

Tendi sighed. "I know, I hated doing it! But if she knew she left the console unattended while we were still asleep, she'd beat herself up about it for days! You know how she is." Sam nodded. He did know how the captain was: short-tempered, stubborn, always biting off more than she could chew and, recently, sinking deeper and deeper into crippling depression. "I'm worried about her, Sam. She's getting desperate. I'm scared she might try something dangerous. Like– I don't know, running off to fight the Borg by herself."

"Yeah," he sighed. "Me too." He gave a quiet half-snicker and added, "She actually kind of reminds me of Mariner that way."

Tendi smiled sadly. "Yeah. She really does." She sighed and looked out again at the passing stars. "Honestly I don't blame her for being worried, though. I mean, we are, too. It's been a year, we don't even know if they're still…" She didn't dare finish the sentence, gulping at having given voice to even as much of the thought as she had.

"Hey." His hand took hers, and she looked over again, worry etched in every premature line that had appeared on her face in the last twelve months. "We're gonna find them," Rutherford reassured her.

Tendi felt herself relax an inch, but still shook her head. "How can you be so optimistic all the time?"

"Eh. It's kind of my MO." Tendi managed an anxious smile, and she leaned over to peck the engineer on the cheek.

"Thanks, Sam. You always know how to make me believe this is going to work."

"Hey, we've got the Tank, we've got the Modesto, we've got a secondhand replicator that makes awful coffee, and we've got the three most desperate people in Starfleet," he joked. "What could possibly stop us?"

Tendi chuckled and opened her mouth to answer when something cut her off—namely, a snippet of a voice from the scanner radio. "–org Cube; we are under attack! I repeat, this is a priority one distress c–"

Click! The radio auto-switched to the next frequency as both Tendi and Rutherford lunged for it. "Turn it back, turn it back!" Tendi urged as he fiddled with the dial.

"I'm trying!" A moment later the radio signal returned. "There!"

"–ty one distress call: our ship is being pursued by a Borg cube, we are under attack! I repeat, this is a priority one distress call–"

"Captain!" Tendi shrieked; Mrs. Freeman startled awake in the bunk. "Listen!"

The human woman scrambled to the front of the ship and heard the repeating transmission. "Ensign Rutherford, find the coordinates of that distress call!" she barked, but there was no need; Rutherford was already typing frantically into a screen on the console. "Ensign Tendi, prepare to warp!"

"I've got the coordinates, Captain!"

"Then get us in there!"

Rutherford transferred the coordinates to Tendi, who locked them into the navigation system and ramped up the speed; immediately the stars flashing around them turned into long white stripes against the black; the ship rattled with the effort, and all of them felt the forces pressing back against them through the cheap hull. "Ending warp speed in three–" Tendi gritted out, "two– brace for stopping!"

"Bracing!"

"–One!"

The ship slowed with an abrupt grinding sound, and the stars around them stabilized and grew distant. All three peered up through the front window and sucked in a simultaneous breath.

Above them a fierce battle was already underway; beams of light were flashing out of what looked like an Akira-class starship towards a large borg cube and were being returned just as quickly. "How close are we to the Borg ship?" Freeman demanded; Rutherford checked his readings.

"Less than a mile, Captain."

"Can we get any closer?"

"I think so…hopefully they're too distracted by the fight to notice us." He and Tendi switched positions, and he flicked the speed up to the lowest notch and let the tiny ship drift towards the monstrous cube above them, its cold black edges silhouetted by the light of a greenish nebula hovering in the near distance. "Two thousand feet, Captain. That's in range, right?"

At his words the older woman nodded tersely and took a very strange device out of her pocket. It looked for all the world like an antique game console in the shape of a childish teddy bear, made out of baby-pink plastic. The screen blinked red once, twice, and then—like a miracle—a little green circle appeared, floating in an undefined gray space on the very edge of the display.

Carol swayed on her feet and nearly dropped the tracker out of relief. "It's her," she breathed. Tendi and Rutherford's expressions both turned stunned; despite their unwavering support of their captain's mission, deep down in their heart of hearts, neither had totally expected this insane plan to work.

All three turned their faces towards the intimidating cube floating just above them. Somewhere, up there, was whatever remained of Beckett Mariner, and hopefully Bradward Boimler with her.

And all they had to do was get into and out of a Borg cube, with two hostages in tow, without being assimilated themselves.

Carol could feel herself shaking; suddenly sleep seemed a million miles away. She clenched her hands into fists and hissed through her teeth the one thought that had been running through her mind for every single second of the last year:

"Let's go get my baby back."

A/N: Had a plot bunny and had to get it out of my head. No idea if I'll actually write more of this; also I haven't written Star Trek fanfic since back in high school, so please don't roast me for not knowing all the lore lol.