Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [142]
“Doctor,” Jason whispered. “Thank you.”
A whispered endearment came from the doorway. He looked over to find his mate, Telluna, standing there in her sleep garment, the fabric’s lush verdil color setting off her beautiful hair. She had always had a resemblance to Jason’s mother, but that was mostly in her pigmentation.
“Jason,” Telluna said, “you should put Gotara to crib. You must be at the hospital early tomorrow. Dr. Ruaal- “
“Dr. Ruaal can wait,” Jason said, a sad smile turning his lips. “I want to spend time with my son.”
Star of the night… Star of the day… come to take my tears away… make my life always bright….
- Tahal-Isut Childhood Prayer
Or the Tiger
Geoffrey Thorne
This tale is set near the end of Voyager’s sixth season.
Geoffrey Thorne
Geoffrey Thorne is a screenwriter and illustrator and lives, incomprehensibly, in Los Angeles with his wife, Susan. He is also the author of “The Soft Room” (Strange New Worlds VI), “Chiaroscuro” (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Prophecy and Change), and “Concurrence” (Strange New Worlds VIII).
“Or The Tiger” marks his first official entry into Voyager’s part of Star Trek mythology. The title comes from another short story, “The Lady or the Tiger,” by Frank R. Stockton.
B’Elanna fell and falling thought, Great. Could this day possibly get any worse?
She hit the deck with a hard wet slap and was grateful that the muscles in her backside were tough enough to absorb the impact.
It was the jolt Voyager took when cresting the latest subspace eddy that had shaken her grip on the upper edge of the Jefferies conduit.
Damned Flewmits, she thought crossly.
Flewmits was the name she’d given to the latest in the seemingly infinite string of hostile aliens Voyager had been unlucky enough to encounter on its crawl through the Delta Quadrant. The ship wouldn’t even be here taking this punishment if not for them.
“Hello, we’re just passing through,” Voyager had transmitted to the first Flewmit sentry ships, only to be met with a barrage of fire from the weird phase disruptor cannons those ships sported.
Thanks to the Flewmits (and some hastily plotted retreat vectors), Voyager was limping along, her systems nearly failing, getting further hell smacked out of her by the appearance of these sprocking subspace oscillations.
“B’Elanna,” said a voice. In addition to the missing electronic chirp, the voice itself was nearly lost in the static of the glitchy comm system.
“Who is it?” said B’Elanna.
“It’s Synge, Boss.” Maddie Synge was supervising gamma shift in main engineering. “We’ve g*** situation, ** could be*”
“Say again, Maddie,” said B’Elanna. “Comms are still acting up.”
“**ergancy, Lieutenant,” said Synge through the chaff. “** *** ** looking at a potential MI event.”
“How far in are we?” said B’Elanna as she burst into the warp-core chamber.
“About ten minutes,” said Synge, peering out at B’Elanna from beneath dark bangs that sweat had plastered to her pale skin.
“QI’yaH,” said B’Elanna even as she pounced on the nearest open console. Every once in a while she resorted to Klingon profanity when her nerves got jangly, despite her antipathy for her mother’s side of the family. “Why’d you wait so long to tell me?”
“I called you as soon as I saw what was happening,” said Synge, dropping in beside her.
B’Elanna’s gaze strayed briefly from the symbols streaming across her screen to the giant translucent cylinder that was Voyager’s warp core. The blue-white alchemy of deuterium plasma and antimatter still flowed as usual but grew darker and darker as she watched. The ship would die about a picosecond after they went black.
Matter inversion.
She’d read about it, of course. Hell, every engineer who ever babysat a warp core kept the hideous possibility in the back of her mind.
The spontaneous reversal of quantum properties such that any warpgenic field destabilizes, expanding beyond containment and spreading the inversion