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

The clink of crystal glasses and the murmur of procedurally generated almost conversation made Paris feel like it had come to life - when, really, it was just holograms and hard light. Adora fidgeted in her seat, fingers tumbling over one another as she rehearsed what she was going to say again and again, her eyes flicking over the skyline of Paris, the glittering and slightly bent Eiffel Tower sitting exactly across from the cafe. Then a horrible thought struck her.

What if Catra didn't like the modern Paris?

What if she asked why the Eiffel Tower was bent!

What if she wanted to see a pre-atomic blast Eiffel Tower? Or, what if she asked why no one had restored it? Then, Adora's entire speech would be derailed! Derailed completely by having to go into the stupid intricacies of the French cultural heritage - a rabbit hole that she herself had gone down while programming this, after asking Tom Paris why the tower was kinda bendy like that. That had nearly robbed her of the entire speech writing time, which was why she had needed to push the date back a week with an excuse about having to review security team briefings. And she had never once thought: Hey, what if I just fixed the tower?

Crap. Crap! Crap!

"Uh, computer!" she said.

"Jeeze, a girl's fifty seconds late to her date, and you start panicking," Catra's voice caused Adora to jerk and spin around.

Then her speech left her head for an entirely different reason.

Adora had said it was a date. Catra had asked 'not, like, a fancy date, right?' and Adora, in a panick, had said no, yes, maybe, wear what you want, sure, anything's fine, bye gotta go. So, she hadn't been expecting Catra to arrive in a ludicrously well cut male style suit, european fashion, with a red jacket and pants that made her look like she was born to kill. Her bare feet skimmed along the ground as she walked forward with her hands in her pockets, her smirk playful. "Nice place. Why's the tower so fuckin' melty, though?" She brushed past Adora, her tail slipping along her pale cheek with a playful flick.

"Uh..." Adora stammered. "T-The, uh...one of...the MIRVs...you looks...good..."

"I look so good that I managed to hit this city with an atomic?" Catra asked, sitting across from Adora, her expression purely smug, radiating a raw 'ah hell yeah, i'm good, aren't I?' She laced her fingers together and rested her chin on her knuckles. "...hey Adora..." she purred, her eyes flickering with playful light.

"H-Hey..." Adora said, slowly.

"You ever think about how...insanely lucky we are? To get here? To end up in this place? The only time and place where being marooned away from civilization still nets you fancy holographic dinners and a steak?" Catra asked, then said, casually. "Computer, replace all men with hot women."

"Not...very realistic for 24th century Paris," Adora said, chuckling.

"Hey, it's my date," Catra said, her eyes sparkling even more. "Computer, make them all dumb blonds."

"Hey!" Adora said.

"What can I say, I have a type," Catra purred, her tail darting behind her, in slow, sinuous patterns. "So, uh, how has your duty shift been going? Is Munroe still itching for more action?"

"No, she's fine," Adora said. Speech. Speech! Her own internal voice sparked at her and she coughed and sat up. "C-Catra, I...was thinking we need to talk." She nodded, firmly. Catra frowned. Her ears twitched down, then started to flick against her head - as if they wanted to pin back and she wasn't letting them.

"Okay," she said, her voice too even. Adora gulped. Shit. Was saying that the wrong start? She didn't want to start off wrong.

"I-it's...I mean, we need to...to talk about our relationship!" Adora said, nodding.

"What's wrong? We're in love, we can finally be together, what more do you want?" Catra asked, her voice immediately angry, defensive.

"Uh-" Adora blinked. Shit. This was not going how she wanted at all. It had been so easy infront of her mirror. She stammered. "N-No, no, no, I! We're great. I'm great! You're great, but-"

"But what?" Catra asked, scowling at her.

"But nothing!" Adora said, hurriedly. Her speech was tumbling, in a tailspin, rushing towards the ground. It was on fire, the wings were peeling off the spaceframe. She hurriedly lurched forward."I meant and! Us, and, that is, we, our relationship and-" Catra was frowning at her. Shit. Shit. Shit! Pull up! "There...we...and...I...I want to have kids!"

Catra blinked at her, her mouth opening. Closing. Opening again. Her ears twitched…and then flattened. "What."

There was no question mark at the end of what.

"I think y-you'd...you'd be a way better...I mean, mom! You'd be a good mom-" Adora stammered. Her entire plan of laying out how actually this was a surprisingly stable place to have children, that starfleet often had children aboard ship, that there was no safer place in the Delta Quadrant, that she was fine waiting as long as Catra needed to take, it all fell apart as Catra stood, her eyes flashing.

"Fuck no," she said, then stalked past Adora.

"Catra, wait!" Adora said, then stood, but Catra was already at the door out - snarling.

"Computer, arch!"

The door opened and shut and Adora stood there, her hands going to her face.

"...stupid!" She hissed, rubbing her palms over her eyes. "Stupid."

Harry Kim sighed as he dialed in on the long-ranged subspace sweeps that the USS Voyager had been throwing out, ever since they entered this area of space. The clear markings of Kazon development and deployment - the small subspace ping stations, the sensor arrays, the passive scanners that were so huge and so primitive that they'd be both easy to spot and impossible to be interesting by the Borg, all of it was signs that they were here. The issue was that there were dozens of Kazon septs, and each one had a slightly different take on their species wide goal of maintaining technological...what was the term?

Harry frowned, slightly. "Thresholders..." He paused, then cocked his head as he adjusted the scope view slightly, parallaxing the energy signatures. "Ah hell."

"What is it, honey?" Princess Lyan Positron asked, phasing into reality behind Harry. Her arms slid around his shoulders and she nuzzled the top of his head. Harry blinked, then looked up at her - he had been working in his home console running through the sensor pings and feedback at his own pace between shifts, so it wasn't exactly shocking to have one of his dimensionally transcendental lovers appear to comfort him. But it was still a pleasant surprise. It was one of the reasons why he liked working from home. Harry sighed, then pointed at the screen.

"See those?" he asked. "Those are warp bubbles - shipping, the kind of thing you get between two planets, right?"

"Mmhmm."

"This planet here has the pretty solid sphere of transmissions, with the classic ten, twenty year bubble of a recent colony. This planet, though? Nothing. There are ships going from a technologically advanced world to a primitive world." He frowned. "And they're not...all...Kazon ships."

"Wait, not all?" Lyan asked, her voice soft, curious. "That seems...odd. If it's a Kazon fiefdom, why are there non-Kazon ships in there?"

"That's what I want to know," Harry said, frowning. He sighed. "I'm going to need to get to the briefing room."

And so, with only a short pause to wipe several lipstick marks off his cheek, he got to the briefing room, where Janeway, D-91, Tom Paris, Torres, Tuvok, T'are and Amy...er...Adora were all ready and waiting. Adora seemed a little distracted - but Harry was more focused on laying out the facts, his projection showing the grainy images and subspace ripples that he had pulled off the sensors. He pointed. "You can see the ship here - the warp signature is enough for a heavy warship or a major transport - it's not a smaller ship, like the other ones."

"It looks like a sheep dog," Janeway said, her voice soft. "Leading a convoy."

"Is this region of space contested? Full of pirates?" Tom Paris asked.

"We haven't seen any sign of it," Harry said. "There's no warning buoys and, more importantly, no ground to run too. The closest thing we've seen to a hiding place is the bleedthrough nebula we passed by three days ago. And that leads to a dimension without the time axis, so, it's not exactly a two way door."

D-91 raised his hand. "This low tech planet. Anything of interest on it?"

"We're not sure, we'll need a closer look," Harry said. "But there are no signs of major mineral deposits, and it's not throwing out the subspace interference patterns of a major subsurface dilithium load. If there's any, it's deep enough to take deep core mining to reach. Now, uh, if there is a deep core dilithium mine there, it'd be a motherload - planets of this classification either have no dilithium or a hell of a lot." He frowned. "But then you'd think the colony would be there."

Janeway nodded. "Opinions so far?"

"It may be prudent to avoid entangling ourselves in this situation, no matter what it is," Tuvok said. "This sept - the Luran - is an unknown quality. Whatever political situation they have with the other aliens here, it is a matter of internal politics and, thus, beyond our purview and firmly in the field of the prime directive."

"What if they're bad guys, Mr. Tuvok?" Tom asked.

"That is, of course, the devil's advocate argument - if they are exploiting a less advanced neighbor, then our essential morality dictates action," Tuvok said, his voice bland. "But such action would need to be grounded in a firm understanding of the subject."

"Tuvok has it right," Janeway said, nodding. "We could dispatch the Val Jean, her cloaking device will keep her hidden."

"I wouldn't," Harry said. "The Kazon have passive observers that can pick up the neutrino flux of a cloaking device. Tactically, they'll be impossible to find. But strategically, operationally, they'll be as much as throwing up a flag. Right now, we're outside of their detection range..."

"And going around would take how long?" Tom asked.

"Two, three months."

"Well, it's a seventy year trip..." Tom muttered under his breath.

"What about a shuttle?" Janeway asked, her voice soft.

"Better chance of being unnoticed," Harry said.

"Better chance of being shot down, or destroyed," Tom said.

"Noted," Janeway said. "However, we need more information before we either go blindly stumbling into things or stumbling around them." She frowned. "IF the shuttle runs into trouble, the Val Jean can swoop in without being directly spotted. She can be our safety net, no?" She smiled thinly. "Who do you think should be the pilot? Adora, I want you on there for tactical analysis."

"Of course, ma'am," Adora said, nodding. Also, I can survive most things, she thought, a bit grimly.

"Best pilot for shuttles?" Tom asked. "Well, if you're not sending me, ma'am, I'd say it'd be-"

Catra glowered at Adora as the two of them stood in the shuttlebay, both of them in their uniforms, phasers at their hips, scanners and survival bags ready.

"Adora," she said, flatly.

"Catra," Adora said back, her voice equally as formal. The urge to apologize, then also, demand that Catra apologize for totally overreacting both slammed into one another, then piled up on the fact that she still needed to be professional and on the ball. So, instead, Adora said. "We're just going in to gather information. So, uh, keep your trigger finger under control."

"Sure," Catra said, frowning. "Which of these buckets are we taking?"

Adora looked over at the shuttles, biting her lower lip.

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MOMENTUM: 0

TRAITS: None

[ ] Shuttlecraft - nice and middle of the road
[ ] Runabout - big and tuff, can be customized with a mission pod!
[ ] Attack Fighter - fastest, sleekest, stealthiest

There's no write in cause...those...those are your three choices...