STAR TREK: A Long Road (Voyager Fix It Quest)

C'nola frowned.

"This is psyker bullshit, so, I gotta find a psyker, right?" She shook her head. "To imagine there'd be a time where I'd miss Sparkles."

Amy woofed.

"Yeah, yeah," C'nola said, then started for the door. She opened it, then turned back, gesturing to Amy. Amy blinked at her with the gormless, loving stupidity of a golden retriever. C'nola's ears drooped and then she gestured at the door leading to the corridor. "Door! Adora! A-Door-ah. Through the door."

Amy got up onto her four paws.

C'nola grinned. "There we go, you..." She trailed off as Amy padded to the shared bathroom in their cabin. "No, Amy, door! This door!" She said, as Amy hopped up and stuck her nose against the sink, licking at the faucet excitedly. "Amy! Bad! Bad! Come on, cats aren't like this, you stupid-" She hurried forward as the door to her cabin shut.

The two crewmen walking past exchanged glances.

"...did you know they're from the evil universe?" Crewman Billingsly said.

"Dude!" Crewman Chapti said. "You can't just call someone from the evil universe."

Janeway sighed.

"Do you need help with that Captain?" Harry asked as she held up the PADD, her eyes narrowing.

"I've been programming these systems since before you signed up in the academy, Ensign," Janeway said, her voice dry purr. "I'll have this wrapped up faster than Admiral Sonnenberg ducks a meeting." She started by bringing up the LCARS system - only to get a bright blue screen. Text scrolled.

LCARS OS CORRUPTED - IMP-TTC PARTICLES DETECTED IN THE CARBONTRIC FLUX CELLS OF YOUR DEVICE. FLUNT DRIVE A.

"Flunt Drive A? Who writes these help programs!?" Janeway huffed. "If it's a problem in drive A, you just need to bypass the CBFCs with a duronic screwdriver."

"Flunting Drive A would fix the problem, Captain," Tuvok said.

"Yes, in the same way dropping an avil on an ant will solve your bug issue, it's wasteful," Janeway said, standing up and stretching. "I'll be getting my duronic screwdriver..." She stepped over to the bridge replicator, tapping at it.

"That is a food replicator, captain," Tuvok said.

"A replicator is a replicator is a replicator, Mr. Tuvok, trust me," Janeway said. "I know what I'm doing."

She tapped a few buttons and the replicator inquired if she was sure. She thumbed down the authorization. A moment later, the replicator began to buzz and whirr. It slowly layered down atomic layer after atomic layer of the duronic screwdriver.

"I don't get why they use CBFCs in PADDs anyway," Harry said. "We could get by with just a pair of oscillating computation cores?"

"While those would be simpler for field repair, they would also require more field repair," Tuvok said. "In the Vulcan Survey, the primary system is simple positronic crystal wafers."

"PCWs!?" Harry exclaimed. "What is this, the 22nd Century?"

"A properly formatted postronic crystal wafer is only ten percent slower than a carbontric flux cell," Tuvok said.

"What is taking this damn thing so long?" Janeway muttered, then slapped the replicator. It chimed and she saw the duronic screwdriver was right there. She reached in, held up the screwdriver, then turned to face Harry and Tuvok, who were both continuing the debate about PCWs and CBFCs for PADDs. "I'll have you know, the main reason why Starfleet switched from oscillating computer cores to carbontric flux cells is that oscillating computer cores are susceptible to Borg direct quantum interference patterns as well as the most recent Cardassian netwar attacks. Now! Watch your Captain at work."

She thumbed on the screwdriver - which promptly sprayed a perfect copy of T'are's favorite lentil soup out of the end.

Brian smashed his makeshift crowbar into the door. It didn't even make a dent - nor did it catch in the seam. Instead, it skittered, then fell from his hands, jarring free.

"Try your might all you wish, mutinous scum," the Cardassian voice over the speakers dripped with smug condescension. "Even now, your nerves will burn with the agony of your treason."

Brian, panting, tapped his combadge. "Captain Wacoche to the bridge, can you at LEAST turn the taunting routines off?"

"Sorry, Captain, Torres is on the line from Voyager - she can barely reach us through the nebular intestines," Tess said over the communicator. "She says the best she can do is patch in her playlist."

"Oh great," Brian groaned.

"Is that bad?" V'orak asked from where she sat in the corner, leaning against the wall as she watched Brian pace around the room.

"Yeah. B'lanna...I love her...but she has the worst taste in music," Brian said.

"Klingon?" V'orak asked.

"Worse, classical," Brian said, wincing.

"Even now, your families are being rounded up on Cardassia. Their names will be stripped from them. Their histories removed. Their statues and household shrines descrated. Their memories will be reduced to ash on the wind of history. Only the state will remember them - and not as traitors, not even as vile enemies, but as numbers to be list-" the voice cut off and a was replaced by a faint tap tap tap, then-

Strum


The guitars continued to stream out.

"Twentieth century rock and roll," Brian explained, sighing. "At least this isn't the...hair metal."

"Hair metal?" V'orak laughed, her tail slapping the ground beside her. "You mammals and your hair! You write songs about your hair."

"The music has very little to do with the actual hair, you know!" Brian said.

The music continued and V'orak's tail slapped against the ground in time with the beat. She bobbed her head with every tap. Brian found his knee twitching with it too. "This is Stockholm syndrome, you know?" Brian asked.

"Oh, absolutely," V'orak said. "Clear case of Gsssaks' Psychosis."

He and the Gorn grinned at one another as the song wrapped - and the next, a screaming driving song about tasting an "invisible bone" - whatever the fuck that meant, came right on. Brian leaned in, speaking quietly under the driving music. "So...I have to know...what's up with the gender swapping? Or is it just the sex swapping? Or...how does all that work? What subspecies are you?"

"Okay. Gorn Hegemony's made up of five distinct reptilian subspecies - we've got the Ssessekh and the Russth, you know those two the most. But we've also got a whole bunch of Xindesh."

"Xindesh? Sounds kind of like Xindi," Brian said.

"Well, yeah. That's cause they are,' V'orak said. "A bunch of them fled there during the Xindi Civil War, and they got adopted into the Hegemony."

"No shit," Brian said.

"They brought with them genetic modulation technology and...we've used for centuries to let us shift between subspecies as we want. That's why we're all Gorn. We tailor ourselves to suit whatever situation we are in, assuming we have time and biomass to work with." She nodded. "I think we have an easier time handling it than you mammals do."

"Oh, hey, we mammals can be Augmented just fine, it's just the rest of the stuff that's hard to deal with," Brian said.

V'orak snorted. "Mammals."

"That's a very Gorn-ey thing to say, you know," Brian said, grinning. "Though, you know, I hear a lot about Gorn and mammals-"

"Oh by the Egg," V'orak groaned, putting her hands over her face. "One human colony ship crashes on a Gorn youngling planet and we don't live it down for two centuries!"

Brian laughed. "What?" he asked.

"You didn't know?" V'orak asked.

"Not really, no," Brian said. "All i know about the Gorn is the-"

"The bit with Kirk, right," V'orak said, causing Brian to nod. "Fuck. Okay. So. I think this is mostly a rimward edge of the Federation thing - but, uh...early on in our contact, this colony ship crashed on a Gorn youngling planet. The SS Puget Sound. Gorn young don't fully develop their upper stage sapience or...sentience, one of the two, until they hit ten years old. It's kinder and easier to leave them on a planet with lots of soft juicy prey and with a few satellites in orbit."

"...oh no..." Brian whispered.

"By the time we got there, the only survivor was this traumatized orphan and-"

"Oh god, yes, I can see how that would be bad," Brian said.

"Yeah," V'orak said.

"See, the biomass thing I heard was that this was why so many Gorn have a thing for mammals."

V'orak let out a hissing sound, like a teakettle. "Pssshthbtththtt!"

"So, you decided to shift to..." Brian prompted.

"The Vissnash subspecies," V'orak said. "It's a new one, actually, experimental."

"What's it for?" Brian asked.

"Diplomacy with non-reptilian species!" V'orak said. "better scent receptors in the nose so we don't need to stick our tongues out so much, better warm blooded circulation, no hibernation cycles, no estrus-"

"Aww," Brian said.

V'orak punched him in the shoulder so hard that he skidded along the floor.

"And!" She added. "The feathers. They look quite fetching."

Brian rubbed his shoulders as the female Gorn adjusted her posture, frilling up her glittering, rainbow scaled feathers as she grinned at him. The music shifted to a new song - and this one, finally, wasn't screaming guitars and fast moving vocals hollering to the heavens about cars and sex and explosions and whatever inane stuff they cared about in the 20th century, this one instead was a slow, mournful piano song. Beautiful counterpoint as V'orak looked at Brian, smiling.

"What do you think?" she asked.


"Uh..." Brian stammered.

C'nola strained on the leash as she walked down the corridor, moving backwards, while Amy whined and dragged her paws on the ground. "Come...on...you...stupid Primarch!" C'nola snarled. "I...won't...let...you...stay...a...DOG!"

She came to the medical bay, which was where Kes normally haunted, and peeked inside.

THe Doctor and D-91 stood there, where a nine foot tall man covered in seaweed, with a wooden tiki mask, slammed a blade directly into the Doctor's chest. The Doctor sighed. "For the last time, not only is this not how plurality expresses itself in all but the most extreme cases, but also, I can't die."

The tiki-head swung around, to look at C'nola. A faint chee chee cha cha sound came from the room. C'nola's brow furrowed. "What the fuck is going on here?" she asked as the nine foot tall figure prowled straight at her. He thrust his knife out the door into her chest - only for it to fuzz into nothingness the instant that it crossed through the doorframe. C'nola ignored the hologram, standing on her tiptoes to look over the figure at the Doctor and D-91.

"Where's Kes!" she shouted as the tiki-headed figure tried to strangle her, but his hands simply vanished as they reached out of the room.

"Oh, we sent her away until we delt with this holographic tripery," the Doctor said. "I think she said she was going for the gym."

"Going to the gym tends to be slang for attending the Orion's orgy, actually," D-91 said, as the figure snapped his head around, then...between blinks, vanished.

"Ah hell, you mentioned orgies," the Doctor said. "Computer, relocate holographic matrix."

He vanished and D-91 jogged out after him.

C'nola scowled at them. Then she looked down at Amy. Amy wagged her tail.

"...this is going to just be one of those days, isn't it?" C'nola muttered.

---
What do!? WRITE IN PLAN VOTE OR ELSE NEELIX GETS IT

JANEWAY
[ ] Flunt the drive
[ ] Okay, no, Harry's right. We should just replicate and cram in some oscillating computation cores
[ ] Wait, you don't need a dutronic screwdriver. You can just remodulate your phaser, set it to stun first
[ ] Maybe Tuvok has the right idea. Some PCWs would work, if you replicated, say, six of them...

BRIAN
[ ] "Buh..."
[ ] "Uh..."
[ ] "...uhhh..."
[ ] "Huh...uh...heh...wow."
[ ] "Why do you have boobs, though?"

CNOLA
[ ] Hit the gym.
[ ] "Hit the gym" (as the kids say these days.)
[ ] Fuck it, there's medicines in here. You've used a medicine like...once. And the machine spirits here are WAY more talkative, you can just ask the omnisiah for help!