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

Harry gaped at the hand offered him. Then he took it, and the stranger yanked him to his feet. She dragged him into the door, slamming it shut behind him. They were in a warehouse and the walls started to buzz and ring with the impacts of sonic weapons in the alleyway. The stranger then took Harry quickly down the side chambers, then to a small set of stairs, leading down into maintenence tunnels. They turned left, right, right, left...Harry started to close count, stumbling after the coated figure, their hands the only guidance he had in the darkness and industrial rumbling of this place.

Then, at last, they ducked into one more room and the door shut. The strange sighed, and Harry panted. He looked around himself, his eyes widening as he recognized that he was in what was clearly a kind of underground scientific facility. There were mass spectrometers bunged together out of scrap and wires, and a small laser scanner that was running over a hunk of pinkish crystal. He recognized that crystal - and he pointed at it, gasping slowly. "What...how..."

"I stole it," the woman said, shucking off her trench coat.

Harry gaped.

The woman...was a robot. Her facial features were clearly modeled after the Vhorni, but her skin was sleek chrome and silvery metal, with clear joins around every moving part of her features, from her neck to her shoulders. Her breasts were large and tipped with rubby nipples, her hips sleek and sweeping outwards into a perfect hourglass shape, a wild contrast to the athletic Lyan and the slender Soria. Harry jerked his head away, blushing, and the woman sighed: "Right, biological modesty." She clicked her tongue. "Ignore it, for the moment." She walked to his side. "My name is Bifurcate. You can call me...Cate, I guess." She quirked silvery-rubber lips up, her hand touching one of Harry's scratches.

"What is going on, Cate?" Harry asked, panting, keeping his eyes focused on her camera lens eyes.

"You...were just in the other world, weren't you?" she asked.

"...yes," Harry said, nodding. "What was that place?"

"It's called Inrohv...Vhorni spelled backwards, very creative. But I didn't name it," she said as she stepped away from him and to the crystal. She adjusted the scanner, her bare back showing off the aesthetic intentions of her designers - Harry wanted to either smack them or shake their hands, he wasn't sure which yet. "Inrohv is connected to our world by a dimensional vacuole. Sudden death can drag one from one to another, but more often than not, you don't survive the process and show up as a cocooned corpse." She shook her head.

"I've gone there and back again," Harry said.

"That's why the Cartels want you," Cate said, glancing over her shoulder. "And why my mistress has tasked me to find and serve you, until we can solve this."

Harry slowly sat down on the nearest chair, sagging a bit. "Your mistress?"

"She's known, on this world, as Miss At, full name Apne At. But on Inrohv, she goes by a more grandiloquent sobriquet," Cate said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

"The Adept of Positrons," Harry said, nodding. "She built you?"

"On Inrohv, but with the ability to split myself between both worlds," she said, then smirked. "Thanks to one of these." She patted the crystal case.

"You're...dilithium powered?" Harry asked, his eyes widening slightly. Cate turned to face him, freezing, her eyes widening with a whirr and a click.

"You know what this is?" she asked.

"Yeah, it's dilithium, it's what most ships use for enhancing and stabilizing matter/antimatter reactions," Harry said. "It's temporally locked - you need to put energy into it at various points along the timeline for it to break. That's why it's so useful, if you work it into an antimatter reactor, it spreads the energy release over a longer, more stable period of time, so you have the juice when you need it without exploding your ship." He blinked. "What do you think it is?"

"The Mining Cartels call them PDMs - paradimensional material," she said, frowning.

Harry stood up, his eyes widening. "Wait, the materials that...they...got us here to trade is just dilithium!?" He shook his head. "I mean, not JUST dilithium, dilithium is valuable as hell. You can't replicate it, mining it is hard as get out, and...but it's just dilithium?"

Cate frowned. "I don't think so. Watch." She grabbed the crystal with one hand, yanking it from the containment unit. She held it aloft, then spoke a single word. "Vaxnia!"

A glowing orb of blue-white light exploded into existence before her, shimmering and flickering, then turning into a swan, which flew about the room, swept around, then crashed back into the dilithium crystal. Cate arched an eyebrow at Harry, nodding slightly. "See?"

"That was what the Vhorni in the other world call...magic," Harry said, slowly. "That's not how dilithium is supposed to act."

"It may be," Cate said. "But it's why the Cartels are mining and selling it so much. And why our world is dying. The Adept of Positron has realized it first - she's active on both worlds and can see the effects...and she built me to try and find a way to stop it. I've been studying this PD...this...dilithium." She set it down, sighing. "But...nothing going. You're a new wrinkle. And a new possibility." She smiled, slightly. "And so, I am at your service."

"We need to contact my ship!" Harry said.

"No," Cate said. "I am under strict orders to maintain as intense security as I can. The Mining Cartels spy on all communications - your ship and your communications are watched. If they make any move, they'll know. The Cartels would want to squash this information."

"What, you think they'll just...keep trying to make a profit as your planet explodes!?" Harry exclaimed, horrified.

Cate cocked her head. "Y...Yes?" She asked, unsure why he was even asking such an inane question. "Of course they would. If they wouldn't they wouldn't be CEOs."

"...fuck," Harry said, sagging. "Okay..." He paused, thinking.

---
CURRENT TRUTHS: "Countdown...to DOOMSDAY!", "Harry Kim is exhausted"
CURRENT MOMENTUM: None

Vote for as many as you want, but you may not be able to do all things! When making your plan vote, PUT THEM IN ORDER!

[ ] Study the Dilithium. Maybe your expertise with the material will do better than Cate's investigations.
[ ] Question Cate about the nature of the apocalypse.
[ ] Question Cate about the political situation in the world
[ ] Fucking get some rest, you're exhausted (this will remove the Harry Kim is exhausted truth)
[ ] Try and establish secure communications with Voyager (you'll have to convince Cate)
[ ] Write In