Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

whispered, “that anticipation of the first kiss is often uncomfortable. I wanted to alleviate the tension.”
    Chakotay drew her even closer than her strong arms had bonded them. “That was very considerate of you . . . what about the second kiss?”
    Her eyes were large enough to reflect the candle and the soft utility lighting behind the ceiling boards to an impossible depth. For a woman whose humanity had been so long lost, she was packed with echoes of life and compassion. Chakotay could look through those windows and see everything—
everything.
    “I'll have to check the database,” she roughly murmured.
    But he didn't wait. Behind her back his arm tightened. He spread his fingers across her spine until he felt the flare of her hip. A little more pressure, and she sank deeper against him. His lips went to her as fluidly as lilies to sunlight.
    For a stiff and soldierly person, Seven melted against him in a way he would never have expected. This should've been much harder for both of them, the way she was, the way he was—the custodians of apartness and untouchability they had fostered in themselves on this ship for the sake of caution suddenly dissolved and were replaced by visceral needs and joys. This was
fun,
plain old happiness—something she had hardly known and that he had almost forgotten.
    “Senior officers report to the bridge.”
    The captain's voice rammed down Chakotay's spine like a needle. What was this—some kind of dime novel? Who had timing this bad!
    He thought about ignoring the call, playing sick, dead, assimilated, anything—
    “Yellow alert. All hands to stations.”
    Assimilated . . . oh . . . hell.
    Breathless and confounded, he took this radiant and rare young woman by the shoulders and deprived himself of her. Despite the interruption, she had a glint of amusement in her eyes. She liked the spontaneous parts of the game more than she had yesterday.
    Chakotay made a sound of dissatisfaction deep in his throat, but he was probably the only one to hear it. Ship's damn business, dammit.
    “Next time,” he vowed, “we deactivate the comm system.”
    * * *
    Chakotay didn't look very happy when he arrived on the bridge with Seven right behind him, but Janeway wasn't interested in why. He seemed to forget his own problems as he glanced around and saw that everyone else was already on station.
    Janeway, Tuvok, Kim, and Paris were already at work at their various stations, but all of them were looking at the same bright new trouble that had opened up before the ship without a single blip of warning. The main screen showed a huge view of the impossible—a gigantic energetic hack mark right through space itself.
    The colors made Chakotay wince as he hurried to her side. “What is it?”
    “Judging from the tachyon emissions,” she said, “some sort of temporal rift.”
    “How's it being generated?” Seven asked from behind Chakotay's shoulder.
    Janeway glanced at her, annoyed at being prodded for information she clearly didn't have, or she'd have told them without being asked. “That's what we're trying to figure out,” she droned impatiently.
    “Could the Borg be doing something?” Harry Kim asked. “I just don't believe they missed us last time.”
    “They're a long way behind us, Harry,” Paris warned, suggesting in a nice way that he shut up about it.
    “Not long enough.”
    “All systems to bear on the rift,” Janeway ordered. “Let's have an analysis. Is it light? Energy? A reflection? Why is it giving us temporal disturbance?”
    “I hate time-travel,” Chakotay grumbled as he punched the controls and tried to focus the sensors. Beside him, Seven was curiously silent. He was closer to her than he needed to be.
    “Is it what is appears to be? A cut in space?” Janeway demanded.
    “Yes,” Seven responded. “It possesses readable dimension and there is physical space within the separations.”
    Tuvok's steady voice went up a notch. “I'm detecting nadion discharges on the other side of the rift.”
    “Weapons fire?” Chakotay said.
    “It's possible,” responded the Vulcan. “The signature appears to be Klingon.”
    A look of surprise passed from face to face, but there was no time to speculate.
    “Red Alert,” said Janeway.
    An alarm sounded at Tuvok's station. “There's a vessel coming through,” he announced.
    “Klingon?” Chakotay asked.
    “No,” Tuvok reported, and turned to look up at the screen.
“Federation.”
    Before anyone