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

Harry Kim sighed, then pulled out his phaser and shot the Adept in the chest. The phaser beam blew through his force field and sent him sprawling to the ground, his sword fuzzing into nothingness. The entire crowd gaped at him and Harry knew that this was his one chance. He stepped forward, holstering his phaser back into his transpoter buffer. "Adepts, people of Vhorni and Inrohv! You have to listen to me...your world is not merely in danger. It is dying. My world once faced the same catastrophe - the same pressures pushed us to it. We had...to much wealth and pride invested in changing anything about ourselves, and so, we almost ended our planet. But you still have time to make different choices, to make different decisions, than what we did. By just transferring some of your mana to Vhorni, you can save both worlds...you may be made less magical and less powerful, but you will have a future. Your children will have that future. And..." He looked down at the Adept of Ultraviolet. "And...if you care enough to kill for your children's honor, I hope you can care enough to live for your children's futures..."

He bit his lip, slightly, watching the lot of them.

Slowly, the Adept of Antimatter began to clap, nodding as he did so, and Infrared stood.

"Hear hear!" Infrared said.

Positron smiled, while Lyan ran to Harry's side, throwing her arms around him, pressing her lithe form against him, her muscular arms squeezing tightly. She buried her face against his shoulder as Harry smiled, then laughed. "Well...that is one way to get in my bed, Sir Harry."

Harry laughed.

"Y-You're joking, right?"


"All right," Positron said, standing before the shimmering portal and the vast sphere of mana that had been gathered and compacted there. "Lets see if this works. Now!" She nodded and the robots, guided by the Inrohv version of Bifurcate, started to push hard. Their synthetic muscles strained and the massive sphere of glowing, greenish crystal started to creak and grind forward, rolling inch by inch towards the buzzing portal. It met the edge of the portal and Harry tensed as he felt the earth under his feet shake.

"Push!" Positron shouted.

The robots tensed and-

"Harry?"

Harry groaned.

"HARRY!"

Harry opened his eyes. A dirty Vhorni miner stood near him, looking horrified, while T'are and Brian Wacohe knelt beside him. Waoche had out a small tricorder and a medical scanner. T'are put her hand on his cheek, feeling him gently. "Harry, are you okay?" she asked.

"Wuh?" Harry asked, groaning as he sat up.

"You need to watch which way you're going!" the mining truck driver said, his voice tight and angry. "You're lucky I just clipped you!"

"You're lucky Harry's okay! Isn't there a speed limit on these roads? Who puts pedestrian traffic and industrial traffic in the same streets!?" T'are snapped as Harry sat up, slowly, his brow furrowing as he looked around himself at the...mostly normal streets around him. It was all familiar. All...like where he'd started. He put his hand to his head, then pulled out his tricorder. Fishing around inside of his transporter buffer, he yanked out his tricorder, and started to scan himself.

"Hey, lady, it's our planet!"

"Your planet is STUPID!" T'are snapped. "You almost killed Harry!"

Harry scanned himself.

He breathed a slow, slow sigh of relief.

"You seem perfectly healthy, but we should get you up to the Doc," Waoche said, helping Harry to his feet. Harry's grin was rueful and dazed.

"No, it's not that," he said, laughing softly. "It's...the temporal difference." He held up the tricorder. "I've twenty four hours older than I was before I got hit by the car, see?" He pointed at the quantum readout.

Waoche blinked, then laughed. "It looks like you're going to have quite the interesting log to file when we get back into orbit."

Harry's face went beat red.

"...yeah." he said. "...interesting."

T'are sniffed. Then sniffed again.

Then her eyes widened.

"...what smells like a threesome?"

"I wish I was Tuvok right now," Brian Wacoche said, slapping his tricorder shut. "...I can't do the eyebrow thing."

"A mission pod?"

Seska nodded. "It is a design I created myself without inspiration," she said, standing up straight before Rak. The tall, currently hermaphroditic, Gorn twitched zir tail and then sighed slowly, looking over the PADD again with a more measured eye. Upon seeing the second glance, Seska added: "...with mild inspiration from technical manuals."

"Seska," Rak said, turning to face her as a few Okampan crew hurried past, carrying with them a huge spool of double-strength corbomite cabling, their faces covered with welding masks and their feet hammering. "You know I'm not actually a member of the crew, right? You can just give this to, say, Catra. Or Adora. Or Tom..." Zi paused as Seksa's throat pouches swelled up. "...are you okay?"

"Nothing," Seska said. "Y-You have the best lead in, socially speaking, to the Captain."

"You do know that Bri won't take your proposal more seriously because you're bringing it up to him through his girlish friend," Rak said.

"It's an excellent proposal!" Seska huffed.

"Seska, you have a seriously overstated idea on how much the replicators on the Voyager can manage - this kind of massive refit and additional outlay in resources is beyond our capacities right now. We're two independent ships, creeping closer and closer to the Big Bad Borg." Zir made little wiggling motions with zir fingers. "We-"

"Resources? I tabulated for that!" Seska said, hurriedly.

"You calculated for the material resources, Gral Seska," Rak said, seriously. "Not for the knowledge resources. It's an old lesson that Starfleet has needed to learn many times - and I've heard Bri grouse about it enough to keep it in my own egg." Zi tapped zir temple. "Between our ships, we have about a thousand people. Each of them is a...highly...trained..."

The three okampans were jogging back the other way, carrying a hissing, half molten corbomite cable under their arms, leaving behind dripping splatters of bright coppery metal on the deck.

"...crew..." Rak said, then turned back to Seska. "But none of them have any training in the kind of advanced metallurgic fields you'd need to create this kind of stuff. You're looking at modular starship components - starships are already the most preposterously complicated thing every put into this universe by rocks that think, and that's when they're not holding the complexities it takes to be rebuilt on the fly by technicians. That's the lesson: You cannot recreate a mature planetary knowledge ecosystem without the population and time of at least a major starbase or similarly sessile civilization." Zir held up zir hands, making connections with zir clawtips. "You need the technicians and the engineers and the scientists and their families and their automation and their communication and computer networks and their databases and their support staff: Artists to keep them from going crazy, churches to keep their spirits pure and focused, bartenders to pour them drinks, dancers to dance with! All this stuff! Stuff we cannot fit onto a flying battlewagon!"

"But we have the files," Seska said.

"You can't just take a Miranda pod and stick it onto a Sovereign class ship, they're-"

"Ahem."

"-they're entirely different technical beasts!" Rak started to tick off zir fingers. "They use different power conduit formats - we'd need to either strip out the entire EPS structure or build an entire secondary reactor, do you want a secondary reactor built by Torres' off duty workers remembering what they picked up in Antimatter Engineering 102?"

"Ahem!"

"And there's the- the-" Rak frowned as zir tail actually got yanked on. Zir and Seska turned at the same time. "What!?"

They both blinked, then.

For standing in the corridor were two aliens. One of them was dressed in a brightly colored shirt, splotchy with eye searing patterns. He wore a kind of broad billed hat around his head, and his face had been slathered with a kind of milky liquid that looked like a kind of primitive protective coloration against ultraviolet radiation. His partner was female, and she had a kind of sarong around her hips, a sleek sports bra around her breasts, and was holding in her hand a suitcase, which was tall enough to rest on the floor despite her hand being near her hip. The man was scowling and, also, was the one tugging on Rak's tail.

"Finally," the man said. "Where is the front desk?"

"Is this really Sikaris? You people have really run down hill..." the woman said, sniffing and shaking her head. "And what are those supposed to be, the bell hop uniforms? Bring back the little ring numbers. I liked those."

"Hush," the man said. When Rak and Seska didn't respond to him immediately, he sighed, then spoke, very slowly and very loudly. "I. Said. Where. Is. The. Front. Desk."

Seska drew her phaser and shot them both.

"Seska!" Rak hissed, zir frills exploding out around her head.

"They were boarding us!" Seska said. "Regulations-"

"Tell me that was on stun!"

Seska slowly, without trying to look like she was doing it, looked at her phaser.

"Other than some mild untreated skin cancer, yes, they're fine," the Doctor said, his face filling a picture in picture window on the upper right corner of the main viewscreen - which itself was set to show their current position in space and the slow sweep of Voyager's tachyon scanners. "Oh, and the fact they were both stunned so heavily they won't be conscious again for twenty four hours."

Janeway, who's finger was making a slow, steady circuit around her temple, said: "Can you wake them up?"

"Found it!" T'are said, pumping her fist. "Sikaris, it's on the subspace beacon networks, it's only a few lightyears away."

"Well, at least they were close to the right spot," Tom said, cheerfully, as he tapped away at his console. "Shall I set a course?"

"Can I wake them up?" The Doctor paused, rubbing his chin. "Hmmm, I could begin injecting the unknown alien species with random stimulants. Which should I start with - Romulan sa or should we go straight to the methamphetamines?"

Janeway shot him her most withering glare.

"I will inform you when the wake up," The Doctor said, and his picture in picture screen blipped off.

"Why did this have to happen before I got my coffee?" Janeway groaned, laying her head back against the chair and closing her eyes slowly.

"Huh," T'are said. "I've got a brochure."

"A what?" Harry asked, his brow furrowing.

"A...a short video clip that, according to the metadata, explains what Sikaris is," T'are said, shrugging.

"Every other civilization out here is playing dark forest gambits to avoid being grabbed by the Borg...and they have a commercial saying come here, say hi?" Tom asked, turning back in his seat to look at them. "Does this strike anyone else as fishy as hell?"

"No, it sounds about right," Catra said, leaning back in her seat, her feet resting on her console. "If they're the kind of assholes who would have a brochure, then they'd be the kinds of assholes who'd send it out while next to Borg space. I once met this guy who tried to sell real estate while in the Citadel of Skulls."

"Play it," Janeway said before Tom, who was mouthing the words 'Citadel of Skulls' to himself, could derail the conversation any further.

The mainscreen darkened. The sounds of sea birds played and it was replaced by a broad, beautiful white beach. Water crashed against it and, standing on the beach, his back turned to them, was an artfully dressed alien male of the same species as two in the sickbay. He turned, as if he had just noticed. "Hi!" he said, beaming brightly. "I'm Gathorel Labin! And welcome! Welcome, to Sikaris!" He spread his arms wide and the screen wiped, showing luminous halls of white marble, full of aliens of various types being served and treated to by others in smart uniforms. "Our region of space is known for being volitile. Dangerous. But here, we Sikarians pride ourselves in offering the finest and best resort in the unknown universe, thanks to our proprietary transporter technology."

The screen wiped again, showing Gathorel stepping forward. He stepped onto a platform and vanished and the camera swept with him, and he was suddenly standing on a hill overlooking a dusty plain. Two armies in gleaming brass and bronze stood arrayed across from one another as Gathorel gestured out to himself. "This world is more than sixty eight billion light years away, in a galaxy so far you can't see it with a telescope!" He grinned at the camera, and winked. "So, there's no chance of littering laws catching up!"

The two armies rushed at one another roaring and the camera panned away as Gathorel made a 'pained' face. "Oooh, they're not getting up from that! But if watching the locals bores you, you can just return to Sikaris with the tap of a button and then travel on." He tapped his wrist and suddenly, was back in an office. "Here at Sikaris, we don't just give you the finest resort in the galaxy. We give you the finest resort...in all possible galaxies."

A melodious tune played as a woman sang quietly: "Sikaris - touch the stars!"

And a logo filled the screen.

Then the screen went black.

"...did he say...sixty eight billion light years away?" Tom whispered.

"That would be easily detectable by modern telescopes," Tuvok said, frowning. "But I find the claims of this planet...dubious."

"As do I," Janeway said, quietly. "But I think it behoves us to at least check it out..." She smirked. "If only to make sure the...did we find an identification on them?"

"The Addans," T'are said.

"The Addans don't waste their ticket," Janeway finished.

---
CURRENT TRUTHS: None
CURRENT MOMENTUM: 0

So! We're going to visit this place and see what's up! What's your away team? Pick...four!
[ ] Write In Away Team

Also, how does Brian handle the fact Seska shot two vacationers
[ ] Light talking too - after all, they might have been dangerous
[ ] Stern talking too - they were obviously not dangerous, but you still get it
[ ] Some kind of actual punishment detail