As Fife had never before contemplated a state of being beyond that which he currently enjoyed, he could only respond with a quizzical stare.
“You could die,” he said. “And you could get the rest of us killed in the pursuit.”
“I won’t ask anyone who isn’t up to the challenge to accompany me,” O’Donnell said, his petulant side rearing its head. “I will leave Demeter in your capable hands and trust that if we attract any unwanted attention, you will preserve the lives of those we command. But I am going.”
Fife nodded briskly. “Please advise me when you are ready to depart.”
“Thank you, Atlee.”
Fife left the lab feeling considerably worse than he had when he entered, an accomplishment he hadn’t imagined possible.
VOYAGER
When Lieutenant Commander B’Elanna Torres entered the astrometrics lab, she found Ensign Icheb and Lieutenant Phinnegan Bryce standing before the large display screen instead of the lab’s usual occupant, Seven of Nine.
Icheb turned immediately to greet her. “Commander, thank you for joining us.”
“You said it was urgent,” she acknowledged. Nothing else could have pulled Torres from her quarters in the middle of gamma shift. Her son, Michael, was still only a few months old and her daughter, Miral, although four, regularly had trouble sleeping through the night. What little sleep she managed to get Torres guarded fiercely.
This night, however, she and Tom had spent nestled in each other’s arms in their living room, attempting to process their losses: Harry Kim, Nancy Conlon, a child Torres had known nothing about and did not fault Tom at all for not having previously mentioned at Harry’s insistence, the Doctor, and so many others. Their grief was raw, truly unfathomable. The loss of so many they considered family was still a stubborn shock. At some point they were going to have to tell Miral, but neither of them could think how to begin that conversation. They needed to pass through the worst of it themselves before they inflicted the truth upon their daughter, who had loved Harry like an uncle and had recently grown close to Conlon as well. The call from Icheb had been something of a relief, but Torres had felt as if she were plowing through deep snow with every step between her quarters and astrometrics.
“Sorry to wake you,” Bryce said.
“It’s okay. I wasn’t sleeping.”
As fleet chief, both Bryce and Icheb fell under her department’s supervision. Despite the fact that Lieutenant Bryce was Vesta’s chief engineer, he seemed to spend every moment of his off hours aboard Voyager. The young man was incredibly capable—nothing else would have accounted for his position or the faith Captain Farkas had placed in him since his field promotion to chief following the critical injury of her first CE, Preston Ganley. And Icheb was the definition of devotion to duty. He had graduated early from the Academy and been assigned to the fleet by Starfleet’s C-in-C, Admiral Akaar. But Torres knew that their constant proximity to each other had a deeper cause, and although she encouraged it in theory, she worried that their relatively new attachment could spell trouble if they didn’t learn quickly how to balance their personal lives with their professional ones.
Of course, she couldn’t imagine having spent this night without Tom’s comforting presence, and she wouldn’t be surprised if Icheb found the same in Bryce’s.
“You wanted me to see something?” Torres asked.
“We do,” Icheb replied.
“We’ve been studying the Galen’s last moments and have detected a few irregularities,” Bryce added. Torres was certain that many of their fellow fleet officers were probably doing the same but probably few as tenaciously as Icheb and Bryce.
“The visual sensor display at the moment of Galen’s apparent destruction is a little confusing,” Icheb continued.
“As are the logs immediately following the event,” Bryce interjected.
Torres’s heart began to burn anew in her chest as she lifted her eyes to the massive image. It had been hard enough to watch on a standard-sized display. Magnified in this way, it felt much larger than life—truly overwhelming. Tears began to sting her eyes, but she forced herself to focus on the data streaming along the side of the screen, registering the atomic information scanned just after the ship appeared to explode. It helped, but just barely.
Icheb reversed the image, stopping it a few seconds before the first flares of the explosion would be visible in the aft section of the small ship.
“Note here, the sensor data,” Icheb said. “Every atom of the ship is accounted for by the sensors as you would expect, along with a surge in tetryonic particles that were initially read as a by-product of the electromagnetic wave that impacted the ship several minutes prior.”
Torres was familiar with this much. She had scanned the logs several times herself.
“There are also trillions of particles the sensors cannot identify,” Bryce continued.
“There was a ton of exotic radiation surrounding the alien vessel,” Torres noted.
“Yes, but if you force the sensors to delineate the proximity of those unidentifiable particles, the far greater mass is found in and around Galen,” Bryce pointed out.
“Suggesting what?”
“The potential presence of a different kind of waveform,” Icheb replied.
“The one that destroyed the ship,” Torres assumed.
“Maybe,” Bryce said.
“Maybe?”
Icheb then advanced the display by ten microseconds. Torres blinked to clear her eyes. For a moment, Galen appeared suddenly almost transparent.
“Is that a rendering error?” she asked.
“The ship was clearly visible on the sensor logs until we ran it through a microspectral scan augmented by an anti-tetryonic algorithm,” Icheb said.
“What the hell is that and why would you run it?” she asked. Torres was as savvy an engineer as any and it had never occurred to her to create, let alone run, an algorithm identifying an anti-particle that was only theoretical.
“I had an idea,” Bryce said with a shrug. “I didn’t want to bother anyone else with it. I know how close you all were to Galen’s crew. I’d only met Benoit a few times and he seemed like a capable and good guy, but
