Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [152]
“Bottom line,” she said. “We could all be sipping margaritas at the Quantum Cafe inside a week.”
After ten unsuccessful days of trying, though some of the crew’s enthusiasm waned, B’Elanna pressed on. Her estimate had been overly optimistic, perhaps, but there was no reason to give up yet.
Janeway obviously agreed, as she gave the engineer as much leeway as she needed, provided some progress was made. Even if it took another month to make the plan work, that still got them home seventy-odd years quicker than the conventional way. Wasn’t that the real, the only, point?
In the interim, they continued to probe and study the alien ship, hoping that the more they learned of its secret history, the more that information might help bring a quicker solution to their shared dilemma.
They learned the name of the alien builders-Moyani. They learned that the ship was really a lifeboat that had just barely escaped the catastrophic failure that had destroyed its mother vessel. The strange subspace patterns in this region had prevented the lifeboat from making a clean escape.
All this was thousands of years ago, and, from the lack of additional corpses, it was presumed that most of the Moyani crew had somehow abandoned the lifeboat as well. How they had left or where they had gone was still a mystery. None of this new information did anything to help B’Elanna.
So she worked, obsessively it seemed to many, at solving the problem of the alien ship’s interconnectivity.
At first she’d thought to simply transplant some of the resonators from the alien ship to Voyager, fire up the alien drive, and bask in the glory of having single-handedly saved Voyager’s crew. The alien machines were uncooperative.
No matter how few of them she removed, in whatever combination, the absence caused nearly every other system on the alien ship to shut down. One such outage caused the return of the original subspace disruptions, so it was determined that no more removals would occur until B’Elanna figured a way around the problem.
After that no one saw much of the engineer. She cloistered herself away in the alien engine room with only her thoughts and the ship’s AI for company.
“B’Elanna,” said a voice from far above her.
She looked up from where she sat, cross-legged, on the facetted crystal floor, to see Tom Paris staring down from what was, to her, the ceiling.
“Go away, Tom,” she said. “I’m busy.”
“That’s no way to talk to your husband,” he said, making his way down the curved wall. He whistled as he took in the huge rib-like spires lancing up from the floor-or down, depending-and the strange non-glowing non-sphere of invisible energy that wobbled in the center.
“I don’t have time for this right now,” said B’Elanna. “Just leave, okay?”
Of course he didn’t leave. He loved her. He was worried about her, about the toll this project was taking on her, on their relationship. Of course she told him to mind his own business, that she knew how much her body could take. The quicker she solved this thing the sooner she could sleep.
“I’m getting us out of here, Tom,” she said. “So you have two options. You can support me and go or…” She trailed off, not really wanting to finish.
“Or?” he said, wanting to hear it, having to.
“Or you can just go,” she said.
They said other things, harsh things that they both knew they’d regret even as the words passed their lips, and then, finally, he did leave.
I’ll make it up to you, she thought as she watched him drop down into the transport tube. An afternoon together on a Risan beach and you won’t remember any of this.
Hours after the dustup, after maddening conversations and debates with the Moyani AI, she thought she might actually have cracked it.
“And this will work?” asked Janeway, dubiously. “You’re sure?”
B’Elanna ignored the captain’s skepticism. She’d just been roused from a deep sleep and presented with a solution to their problem so obvious that she likely thought it the product of the engineer’s fatigued mind.
“Well,