An Exercise In Futility: Chapter Ten
Feb. 22nd, 2021 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bungakertasTom Paris was not flying Voyager.
He was still piloting, of course, because nobody could pilot the ship like he could. The unofficial name for this trick was the Riker Maneuver. Put your ship dead exactly over the planet’s magnetic pole, shut down all non-essential systems, and let the magnetic interference hide you. Only with non-essential systems shut down, that left you with minimal maneuvering power. And starships were big animals that, when in an atmosphere, were designed to pretend things like inertia and air friction were for other people. Holding still was not a natural state for a starship. Any starship. But when trying to hide like this, you didn’t want to use a lot of thrusters. And Tom didn’t have a whole lot of thrusters to use.
He was not flying Voyager. He was holding Voyager fantastically, infinitesimally, microscopically still over the exact magnetic north pole of the planet, it was very difficult and stressful, and he was starting to think fondly of being back in prison because of it.
Prometheus was at the south pole and they were both aimed directly at the little outpost, listening to the reports from the defenders coming in over the comm. The reports had been entirely positive until Chakotay’s voice came in over the hailing frequency.
“Voyager, Prometheus! Time for part two!”
A huge crash sounded in the background.
“Mr. Paris!” Janeway said.
Tom was already executing the command they’d set up. They’d calculated a very tiny warp jump to bring them almost instantly on top of the Super-Collective’s ha’tak at the same time as Prometheus did the same thing with their ship. And then both Voyager and Prometheus let loose a devastating barrage, forcing the enemy ship to go down further and further towards the ground.
Voyager and Prometheus had both been designed to be able to land if necessary. But according to Daniel Jackson’s excellently informative lecture, ha’tak vessels had been designed to land only on specially constructed platforms. That ship was not going to land gently.
Voyager’s shields absorbed some return fire from the ha’tak, but it was clear they were doing serious damage to it. The Super-Collective’s internal disagreements had apparently prevented any real adaptation to the combined weapons of their two ships.
Then there was a moment where the enemy ship seemed to get caught on some invisible string, internal forces temporarily stronger than anything else acting on it.
“Cease firing,” Janeway ordered.
Tom pulled his hand away from the weapon’s controls and they all watched the ha’tak for a moment. And then, suddenly, it broke into two separate, jagged pieces and fell, smoking, the remaining distance to earth. Tom watched in alarm as the ground seemed to ripple from the force, spreading outwards towards the research station. Tom winced as he watched the building shake from the impact.
“Chakotay, report!” Janeway snapped, twisting in her seat to face Harry, as if that would somehow bring her closer to her First Officer. Tom didn’t blame her. Everyone on the bridge had turned to face the ops station.
“We’re okay,” Chakotay’s voice said, and Tom felt the tense feeling slip from between his shoulderblades. “Knocked off our feet, and I’m not sure this outpost will ever be the same again, but we’re okay. No fatalities reported. A few broken bones, and Vorik was hit by weapons’ fire, but he’ll be okay.” There was a pause and then he said, “Status on our ships?”
“Voyager reports no casualties,” Harry said, after checking his board.
“Prometheus reports no casualties,” Colonel Pendergast said a moment later.
Tom finally allowed himself to smile. “So what do they do for fun in this galaxy?”
Janeway gave him an answering grin. “Mr. Paris, bring us to a standard orbit. Mr. Kim, beam down medical teams. Let’s see how many of those drones we can save.”
Tom signaled Prometheus their trajectory, and then smoothly assumed a geo-synchronous orbit before handing the conn off to Rory Jenkins and going to beam down to join the medical teams.
He didn’t have a lot of experience with what he was walking into, so he felt he could be forgiven for being shocked when he was beamed into a portion of the downed ha’tak and was immediately confronted with a contorted human body, irrevocably dead, the top and bottom of the torso having been severed brutally in the middle by a fallen support beam.
It’s always so much cleaner on Voyager, Tom marveled, staring in shock at the blood pooling on the floor. Somehow, despite all the horrible injuries he’d seen, none of them had ever seemed quite this…shockingly present. Even death in a vacuum—the nightmare of “getting spaced” that every member of Starfleet had and then promptly denied ever having—wasn’t messy. It wasn’t even painful, if the literature was to be believed.
This would’ve hurt. This would’ve been slow.
He looked at his hands, suddenly shaking.
“Hey!” a voice called. He looked up to find someone staring at him. A woman, short, with reddish-brown hair. “Are you one of Voyager’s medical personnel?”
“I’m…” He trailed off. Somehow he couldn’t figure out how to say yes without sounding dishonest. He’d been manning the weapons. This was his work that was bleeding out onto the floor.
“Listen, I understand that this is a shock, but these people need help sooner, not later. If you can focus, you can help me. If you can’t, you’ll need to go outside,” she said. The words sounded harsh, but Tom understood the reasoning behind them.
“I can focus.”
“Then come with me.”
Tom followed the woman, who introduced herself as Doctor Janet Frasier, and did exactly as she ordered without speaking for a few moments, until he caught himself reflexively handing her a dermal regenerator and watched in amusement as she frowned at it before handing it back.
“Sorry. This is good for bleeding like this, though,” he told her. He held it over a deep cut on the drone between them and turned it on. Dr. Frasier watched in astonishment as the tissue knit itself back together under the slight hum of his device.
“Oh, we may want to ask you to trade for some of those,” the doctor said as she watched in amazement.
“I don’t know if the captain will let them go,” Tom sighed, “but she’d at least listen to your offer. It’s called a ‘dermal regenerator.’”
“That wasn’t a dermis it regenerated,” the doctor said with a sparkle in her eye.
“I know, but that’s what it’s called anyway,” Tom laughed.
They moved through the ship, putting people back together, occasionally fending off the odd replicator bug that hadn’t quite been disabled, and marking the location of the dead. They’d just finished marking the location of a dead drone when Tom said, “I did this.”
Frasier looked at him curiously.
“I was the weapon’s officer on Voyager,” Tom explained.
“And then they sent you straight here as a medic and the first thing you saw was that poor jaffa,” Frasier said, in a tone that indicated she understood what he was driving at. “That would be confusing.”
“I wasn’t even supposed to be a medic, but there wasn’t anyone else,” Tom told her, suddenly wanting to be understood.
“Your ship is a bit of a puzzle to us. People keep calling it a ‘heavily modified research vessel,’ which is an…interesting classification. I don’t want you to get into any trouble telling me things you shouldn’t, but…we are pretty curious,” Frasier said.
“I can’t give away technology. But stories are free,” Tom said. And the whole story came pouring out of him. Voyager’s original mission, getting stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the Maquis, the Borg, he and the Doctor being the only medical personnel—and the Doctor was a hologram, which was weird—and how, after so many years and so little progress to show for it, though admittedly more than they expected, he was beginning to doubt if they would ever get home.
“And a part of me is starting to wonder if I even want to,” Tom confessed. “I don’t really have a lot waiting for me back on Earth. I’ve done more good on Voyager than I ever did anywhere else.”
Fraiser looked a little too shrewd at hearing what he told her and he wondered if he had given away too much, although he honestly couldn’t see how. What she said was, “It must be hard with so many people and so few doctors.”
“Every runny nose in the galaxy, you would not believe,” Tom groaned.
Frasier laughed, and—as they moved through the ship—told him some of her more amusing medical anecdotes, edited to protect the guilty.
They were just finishing up on a drone when ominous little taps alerted Tom and Frasier to a nearby replicator. The two turned in the direction of the noise and both opened fire on the little machine. When they’d reduced it to little blocks, Tom heard a voice say from another room, “Why must tau’ri weapons be so loud?”
Tom blinked. “Mmmm…Malek?”
“Indeed.” A drone moved around the doorway, hands held out to show open palms.
“The guns operate with explosions,” Frasier told him with a smile. “What’s the excuse for the staff weapons?”
Malek laughed, although it sounded odd from the mouth of a Borg drone. “The developer of the ma’tok is not in my genetic lineage. I do not know why they were made so loud.”
Tom scowled. “I’m gonna need an explanation on how that was an answer at some point. But for the moment, I think you need some assistance to de-assimilate.”
“I would be grateful. My host is deeply frightened and I am having trouble reaching his mind. The sooner he is removed from the influence on these awful Borg creatures, the better.”
Tom removed his commbadge and stuck it on Malek’s chest. Then he tapped it. “Voyager, lock on to my commbadge and beam it directly to Prometheus sickbay.”
“Acknowledged. Stand by,” Harry replied calmly.
“Tell Colonel O’Neill that his 302 is in the Glider Bay. He will not need to explain its absence to Congress,” Malek said.
Fraiser started laughing. “Even I’m glad to hear that.”
“Transport in progress,” Harry announced from commbadge.
Malek disappeared in a shower of sparkles.
Frasier blinked. “Well, your transporter technology is certainly prettier than ours.”
“How’d you come across the advanced technology, anyway?” Tom asked, curiously.
“Some of it we discovered using the stargates,” Frasier replied, “some of it we backwards-engineered—well, Sam did most of the backwards-engineering, but I was…there—backwards-engineered from technology we recovered from the goa’uld. But most of what makes up Prometheus was gifted by an allied race called the Asgard.”
Tom thought about inquiring after the Asgard, but after a moment, he decided to ask something else. “How bad are the goa’uld, exactly?”
Frasier gave a shudder. “Awful.” She paused a moment, then shrugged. “But if stories are free…” And Tom found himself hearing about the frankly horrifying practices that the goa’uld had visited out on the humans of the galaxy. And as he listened, he realized that these humans must’ve started tackling the goa’uld with no advanced technology at the outset.
Maybe they should ask them to start thinking on ways to defeat the Borg.
He was still piloting, of course, because nobody could pilot the ship like he could. The unofficial name for this trick was the Riker Maneuver. Put your ship dead exactly over the planet’s magnetic pole, shut down all non-essential systems, and let the magnetic interference hide you. Only with non-essential systems shut down, that left you with minimal maneuvering power. And starships were big animals that, when in an atmosphere, were designed to pretend things like inertia and air friction were for other people. Holding still was not a natural state for a starship. Any starship. But when trying to hide like this, you didn’t want to use a lot of thrusters. And Tom didn’t have a whole lot of thrusters to use.
He was not flying Voyager. He was holding Voyager fantastically, infinitesimally, microscopically still over the exact magnetic north pole of the planet, it was very difficult and stressful, and he was starting to think fondly of being back in prison because of it.
Prometheus was at the south pole and they were both aimed directly at the little outpost, listening to the reports from the defenders coming in over the comm. The reports had been entirely positive until Chakotay’s voice came in over the hailing frequency.
“Voyager, Prometheus! Time for part two!”
A huge crash sounded in the background.
“Mr. Paris!” Janeway said.
Tom was already executing the command they’d set up. They’d calculated a very tiny warp jump to bring them almost instantly on top of the Super-Collective’s ha’tak at the same time as Prometheus did the same thing with their ship. And then both Voyager and Prometheus let loose a devastating barrage, forcing the enemy ship to go down further and further towards the ground.
Voyager and Prometheus had both been designed to be able to land if necessary. But according to Daniel Jackson’s excellently informative lecture, ha’tak vessels had been designed to land only on specially constructed platforms. That ship was not going to land gently.
Voyager’s shields absorbed some return fire from the ha’tak, but it was clear they were doing serious damage to it. The Super-Collective’s internal disagreements had apparently prevented any real adaptation to the combined weapons of their two ships.
Then there was a moment where the enemy ship seemed to get caught on some invisible string, internal forces temporarily stronger than anything else acting on it.
“Cease firing,” Janeway ordered.
Tom pulled his hand away from the weapon’s controls and they all watched the ha’tak for a moment. And then, suddenly, it broke into two separate, jagged pieces and fell, smoking, the remaining distance to earth. Tom watched in alarm as the ground seemed to ripple from the force, spreading outwards towards the research station. Tom winced as he watched the building shake from the impact.
“Chakotay, report!” Janeway snapped, twisting in her seat to face Harry, as if that would somehow bring her closer to her First Officer. Tom didn’t blame her. Everyone on the bridge had turned to face the ops station.
“We’re okay,” Chakotay’s voice said, and Tom felt the tense feeling slip from between his shoulderblades. “Knocked off our feet, and I’m not sure this outpost will ever be the same again, but we’re okay. No fatalities reported. A few broken bones, and Vorik was hit by weapons’ fire, but he’ll be okay.” There was a pause and then he said, “Status on our ships?”
“Voyager reports no casualties,” Harry said, after checking his board.
“Prometheus reports no casualties,” Colonel Pendergast said a moment later.
Tom finally allowed himself to smile. “So what do they do for fun in this galaxy?”
Janeway gave him an answering grin. “Mr. Paris, bring us to a standard orbit. Mr. Kim, beam down medical teams. Let’s see how many of those drones we can save.”
Tom signaled Prometheus their trajectory, and then smoothly assumed a geo-synchronous orbit before handing the conn off to Rory Jenkins and going to beam down to join the medical teams.
He didn’t have a lot of experience with what he was walking into, so he felt he could be forgiven for being shocked when he was beamed into a portion of the downed ha’tak and was immediately confronted with a contorted human body, irrevocably dead, the top and bottom of the torso having been severed brutally in the middle by a fallen support beam.
It’s always so much cleaner on Voyager, Tom marveled, staring in shock at the blood pooling on the floor. Somehow, despite all the horrible injuries he’d seen, none of them had ever seemed quite this…shockingly present. Even death in a vacuum—the nightmare of “getting spaced” that every member of Starfleet had and then promptly denied ever having—wasn’t messy. It wasn’t even painful, if the literature was to be believed.
This would’ve hurt. This would’ve been slow.
He looked at his hands, suddenly shaking.
“Hey!” a voice called. He looked up to find someone staring at him. A woman, short, with reddish-brown hair. “Are you one of Voyager’s medical personnel?”
“I’m…” He trailed off. Somehow he couldn’t figure out how to say yes without sounding dishonest. He’d been manning the weapons. This was his work that was bleeding out onto the floor.
“Listen, I understand that this is a shock, but these people need help sooner, not later. If you can focus, you can help me. If you can’t, you’ll need to go outside,” she said. The words sounded harsh, but Tom understood the reasoning behind them.
“I can focus.”
“Then come with me.”
Tom followed the woman, who introduced herself as Doctor Janet Frasier, and did exactly as she ordered without speaking for a few moments, until he caught himself reflexively handing her a dermal regenerator and watched in amusement as she frowned at it before handing it back.
“Sorry. This is good for bleeding like this, though,” he told her. He held it over a deep cut on the drone between them and turned it on. Dr. Frasier watched in astonishment as the tissue knit itself back together under the slight hum of his device.
“Oh, we may want to ask you to trade for some of those,” the doctor said as she watched in amazement.
“I don’t know if the captain will let them go,” Tom sighed, “but she’d at least listen to your offer. It’s called a ‘dermal regenerator.’”
“That wasn’t a dermis it regenerated,” the doctor said with a sparkle in her eye.
“I know, but that’s what it’s called anyway,” Tom laughed.
They moved through the ship, putting people back together, occasionally fending off the odd replicator bug that hadn’t quite been disabled, and marking the location of the dead. They’d just finished marking the location of a dead drone when Tom said, “I did this.”
Frasier looked at him curiously.
“I was the weapon’s officer on Voyager,” Tom explained.
“And then they sent you straight here as a medic and the first thing you saw was that poor jaffa,” Frasier said, in a tone that indicated she understood what he was driving at. “That would be confusing.”
“I wasn’t even supposed to be a medic, but there wasn’t anyone else,” Tom told her, suddenly wanting to be understood.
“Your ship is a bit of a puzzle to us. People keep calling it a ‘heavily modified research vessel,’ which is an…interesting classification. I don’t want you to get into any trouble telling me things you shouldn’t, but…we are pretty curious,” Frasier said.
“I can’t give away technology. But stories are free,” Tom said. And the whole story came pouring out of him. Voyager’s original mission, getting stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the Maquis, the Borg, he and the Doctor being the only medical personnel—and the Doctor was a hologram, which was weird—and how, after so many years and so little progress to show for it, though admittedly more than they expected, he was beginning to doubt if they would ever get home.
“And a part of me is starting to wonder if I even want to,” Tom confessed. “I don’t really have a lot waiting for me back on Earth. I’ve done more good on Voyager than I ever did anywhere else.”
Fraiser looked a little too shrewd at hearing what he told her and he wondered if he had given away too much, although he honestly couldn’t see how. What she said was, “It must be hard with so many people and so few doctors.”
“Every runny nose in the galaxy, you would not believe,” Tom groaned.
Frasier laughed, and—as they moved through the ship—told him some of her more amusing medical anecdotes, edited to protect the guilty.
They were just finishing up on a drone when ominous little taps alerted Tom and Frasier to a nearby replicator. The two turned in the direction of the noise and both opened fire on the little machine. When they’d reduced it to little blocks, Tom heard a voice say from another room, “Why must tau’ri weapons be so loud?”
Tom blinked. “Mmmm…Malek?”
“Indeed.” A drone moved around the doorway, hands held out to show open palms.
“The guns operate with explosions,” Frasier told him with a smile. “What’s the excuse for the staff weapons?”
Malek laughed, although it sounded odd from the mouth of a Borg drone. “The developer of the ma’tok is not in my genetic lineage. I do not know why they were made so loud.”
Tom scowled. “I’m gonna need an explanation on how that was an answer at some point. But for the moment, I think you need some assistance to de-assimilate.”
“I would be grateful. My host is deeply frightened and I am having trouble reaching his mind. The sooner he is removed from the influence on these awful Borg creatures, the better.”
Tom removed his commbadge and stuck it on Malek’s chest. Then he tapped it. “Voyager, lock on to my commbadge and beam it directly to Prometheus sickbay.”
“Acknowledged. Stand by,” Harry replied calmly.
“Tell Colonel O’Neill that his 302 is in the Glider Bay. He will not need to explain its absence to Congress,” Malek said.
Fraiser started laughing. “Even I’m glad to hear that.”
“Transport in progress,” Harry announced from commbadge.
Malek disappeared in a shower of sparkles.
Frasier blinked. “Well, your transporter technology is certainly prettier than ours.”
“How’d you come across the advanced technology, anyway?” Tom asked, curiously.
“Some of it we discovered using the stargates,” Frasier replied, “some of it we backwards-engineered—well, Sam did most of the backwards-engineering, but I was…there—backwards-engineered from technology we recovered from the goa’uld. But most of what makes up Prometheus was gifted by an allied race called the Asgard.”
Tom thought about inquiring after the Asgard, but after a moment, he decided to ask something else. “How bad are the goa’uld, exactly?”
Frasier gave a shudder. “Awful.” She paused a moment, then shrugged. “But if stories are free…” And Tom found himself hearing about the frankly horrifying practices that the goa’uld had visited out on the humans of the galaxy. And as he listened, he realized that these humans must’ve started tackling the goa’uld with no advanced technology at the outset.
Maybe they should ask them to start thinking on ways to defeat the Borg.
- Voyager Discovers an Alien Satellite and Accidentally Finds Out What It Does
- The Tok’ra Ask to Borrow Prometheus for a Scientific Field Trip
- Many Meetings are Met and Many Questions are Partially Answered
- A Vessel Has Been Detected. Prepare for Assimilation
- How Dr. Daniel Jackson, the Peaceful Explorer, Had an Excellent Day Indeed
- Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations: Observations On Interaction With Humans
- The Battle For Voyager’s Main Engineering
- Attack With The Army You Have, But Give That Army All The Guns And Ammo They Can Carry
- Traps And Resistance
- Sometimes A Pilot’s Job Is Counterintuitive
- All Days Are Good Days To Witness The Death Of A False God
Tags:
- anise,
- borg,
- carson beckett,
- chakotay,
- daniel jackson,
- freya,
- george hammond,
- harry kim,
- jack o'neill,
- jacob carter,
- kathryn janeway,
- malek,
- prometheus,
- replicators,
- sallash,
- samantha carter,
- selmak,
- seven of nine,
- sg-1,
- star trek,
- stargate,
- story: futility,
- teal'c,
- the holo doctor,
- tom paris,
- tuvok,
- voyager,
- zipacna
