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

As the Stardancer and the shuttle floated together, Torres frowned and considered, as she often did at times like this, how she had gotten into this place. She had taken every step that had made sense and seemed reasonable at the time - with the only alternatives being cowardice, disgrace and dishonor - and yet, she still found herself elbows deep in a fantastically ancient fusion reactor that was kept together with duct tape, floating above an alien space base that was preparing to test torpedoes that would, in a single shot, end her and the lives of everyone she cared about, with no help but a stupid alien teenager, all while being seventy thousand light years from home...

It made one almost want to reconsider the ethics of fighting fascism.

"Don't even know if the Cardassians are still fascists," she muttered under her breath. "Maybe, hah, maybe they rose up against their masters. Maybe there's a trial right now. Maybe Gul Dukat's on trial." She wrenched hard at a bolt, groaning. "Maybe...hah!"

"What's that?" Kar asked over the com.

"Nothing," Torres muttered.

The moon floated by as she took the component she was trying to free. Then she kicked off the Stardancer and came to the shuttle - her space suited figure moving through the void with grace and agility. She came up to the busted connector between the nacelle and the rest of the ship and started to get to work. "See, the problem is, your magnetic systems will work to divert energy flow between the main hull of the shuttle and our nacelle. But you don't have nearly the right energy containment topography, we're going to leak everywhere."

"You mean we'll be obvious on sensors and radioactive!?" Kar asked.

"...yeah," Torres said, lifting her head to peer at him through her faceplate - his face was pressed against the glass canopy of the shuttle. "You followed that?"

"I'm not a moron!" he snapped.

"You are mooning after a girl who's a subjective light minuet away when you mine monopoles," Torres said. "Long distance relationships don't work, not when you're a teenager."

"Love can overcome anything!" Kar said, defensively.

"Sure, love can. But teenagers don't fall in love. They fall in stupid and then hormones hit you," Torres said. "If you're preposterously lucky or have really good parents..." She grunted as she tugged free a mangled chunk of Federation technology, then beamed it into her transport waste buffer, where it would get processed down into feedstock. "...then you may live long enough for stupid to become love. But love takes time. And it takes knowing what you're about. It takes the world kicking you in the head a few times."

"...whoa..." Kar whispered.

Torres lifted her head and saw that he was looking at her, like, really looking at her.

Ah shit, Torres thought.

She ducked her head and started to get back to work. "Keep watching the sensors, or the kicking won't be metaphorical, kid!"

"Y-Yes ma'am!"

Tuvok and Kes started to search the components. "We need a flux magnitar and a triple threaded condensor coil, according to Torres," Kes said, frowning as she walked along the boxes. "Will the universal translator translate engineering speak between- oh, hey, triple threaded condensor coil!" She brightened as she took hold of the box and yanked it down off the shelf as Tuvok continued his searching.

She scowled.

"Empty," she said.

"It appears that the magnitar container is also empty," Tuvok said. "Curious. This is the storeroom. One would imagine spares would be held. Save that those components are required for the moderation and control of warp fields and dilithium matrixes. While speculation may be ill founded...I cannot be remember that this is a base for the experimentation and creation of transwarp prototypes."

"Shit, you think they're using all the bits we need?" Kes asked, frowning as she walked around to come to the front of the storage habitat. There was a low window here, situated right before a console that contained the inventory for the entire base. The only reason she and Tuvok had used their mark one eyeballs rather than checking the far faster registry was simplicity itself: The console was locked in its sleep mode, with a password-pin request on the front. It might have been as simple as 1234 or the birthday of the guard - they didn't know, and inputting random numbers into a secure console seemed like the best way to draw attention to themselves.

"It is-"

Tuvok was cut off by a subliminal rumbling, felt through the floor. Kes and he turned and saw that the white lunar regolith that made up the center of the base was starting to buzz, vibrate, then pull aside as formerly concealed doors began to swing wide. A large, articulated elevator-arm combination came sliding silently into the air, the only hint that it was moving at all coming through the soles of Tuvok and Kes' feet. It locked into place, and perched atop it were a trio of long, bulbous, beetle shaped devices that looked more in common with primitive chemical rockets than any kind of torpedo Kes had seen on the Voyager or the Val Jean. Tuvok immediately pursed his lips.

"No warheads," he said. "Test models."

"They have nacelles," Kes whispered.

Each rocket had a quartet of nacelles, in fact, formed in a perfect radiator pattern and each linked with a circular curve like the discus shape that she had seen on holos of Vulcan science ships in the Voyager's computer banks. She turned back to Tuvok.

"How long do you think we have until they launch?" she asked.

"Test in T-minus six minutes and thirty two seconds," the PA said, the excited sounding Kazon voice echoing off the walls.

Tuvok inclined his head to the side for a moment. "I would say approximately five meklars, the Kazon unit of time most analogous to the Terran minute."

Kes nodded. "Yeah, I figure that too," she said, quietly.

--
MOMENTUM: 3
CURRENT TRAITS
Aww, mom, why does he have TWO ticking clocks!?

What's your plan?
[ ] Time to maximalize this: Sneak to the launch room, stun everyone from ambush, shut down the launch, steal everything, and leave.
[ ] Lets try some sabotage. A stealthed phaser shot at a precisely chosen component, just enough to weaken it, to cause the whole launch to fail. In the confusion, sneak to the computer bay and start deleting stuff
[ ] Write In!