Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [159]
“The Moyani are gone,” said Captain Janeway. She was simultaneously going over B’Elanna’s report and watching her from the far side of her desk. The captain’s face wore the hooded expression she usually reserved for adversaries. “And Voyager is no better off and no closer to home.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said B’Elanna stiffly. “No, ma’am.”
“And Noah Lessing’s in sickbay,” said the captain.
“Yes, ma’am,” said B’Elanna.
“Put there by you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the engineer. “I thought he was trying to- “
“I can read, Lieutenant,” said Janeway. She quickly burned through the rest of the written report on her padd and then fixed a frosty gaze on B’Elanna. “How would you rate your performance during this incident?” she said.
“Substandard,” said B’Elanna with obvious difficulty.
“At least,” said the captain. “Recommendation?”
B’Elanna’s mind was blank. She’d handled the whole thing so abysmally that coming up with an appropriate reprimand seemed impossible.
Janeway let her stew there for a few moments before letting her off the hook.
“All right, B’Elanna,” she said. “We’ll just chalk this up as a learning experience. Sometimes the bear gets you.”
B’Elanna, at a clear loss for words, only nodded and asked if the captain had anything more.
“You’re dismissed, Lieutenant,” said Janeway, and then, as B’Elanna was passing through the cabin door, “Better luck tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said B’Elanna as the doors shut behind her.
She found Tom in bed already half-asleep after his own long shift.
“Hey,” he said blearily as she crawled in with him. She pulled in close, feeling his soft familiar heat, taking in his comforting scent.
“Hey,” she said.
“What are you doing?” he asked, as her cheek settled against his chest.
“Apologizing,” she said.
Bottomless
Ilsa J. Bick
This tale is set during the second half of Star Trek: Voyager’s seventh season.
Ilsa J. Bick
Ilsa J. Bick is a writer as well as a recovering child and forensic psychiatrist. She is the author of such prize-winning stories as “A Ribbon for Rosie,” Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II; “Shadows, in the Dark,” Strange New Worlds IV; and “The Quality of Wetness,” Writers of the Future, Vol. XVI. She’s written for SCIFICTION, Challenging Destiny, Talebones, Beyond the Last Star, and Star Trek: New Frontier: No Limits, among many others. Her first published novel, Star Trek: The Lost Era: Well of Souls, cracked the 2003 Barnes and Noble Bestseller List. Her Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers novella “Lost Time” debuted in April 2005, and “Wounds, Part One” and “Wounds, Part Two” appeared in August and September 2005.
She’s active in the Battle Tech/MechWarrior Dark Age universe on BattleCorps.com, and her MWDA novel Daughter of the Dragon was released in June 2005. Blood Avatar, a murder-mystery set in the MechWarrior Dark Age universe, is forthcoming in December 2005, as well as a sequel to Daughter due out in 2006.
When she isn’t writing-like, yah, when is that?- she lives in (mostly frigid) Wisconsin with her husband, two children, three cats, and other assorted vermin. Sometimes, she even cooks for them.
The two men Janeway loved most, her father and Justin Tighe, drowned beneath a polar ice cap on Tau Ceti Prime. She should’ve died with them but didn’t. Afterward, she wished she had. For months, she lay awake at night, staring into an endless darkness and imagining what it was like to drown: water all around, the light from above fading, your lungs burning until you can’t help it, you have to breathe though you know it’s hopeless-and then you vomit out the last of your life in huge, shuddery, silver bubbles that rise higher and higher toward people and places you’ll never see again, never. The scenario played in her mind on an infinite loop, around and around and around. And, finally, she decided: The sea is dark and bottomless and very lonely, and in the end, no one is with you when you die.
A little bit like now.
Her head throbbed. Her limbs felt molten. The air was very hot, and fetid with the heavy stink of sweat, wet copper, and rot. Chakotay