Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

her vaulted experiences collected at such risk and strain here in the Delta Quadrant. She wanted to be an adventurer on purpose instead of by accident!
    “The almighty Temporal Prime Directive,” the admiral drawled with acrid contempt. “Take my advice. It's less of a headache if you just ignore it.”
    Janeway's reaction again was mixed. Contempt for regulations? Respect for them was all that had kept
Voyager
held together as a Starfleet ship out where, where there was no Starfleet watching.
    “You've obviously decided to ignore it,” she said, “or you wouldn't be here.”
    “A lot's happened to me,” the admiral admitted, “since I was you.”
    The odd pronouncement made Janeway angry. She had a visceral reaction and rubber-banded in the opposite direction from where the admiral wanted to go. Childish? Maybe.
    “Well, I'm still me and this is still my ship. So no more talk about what's going to happen until I decide otherwise. Understood?”
    “All right,” the admiral accepted, too quickly. “Let's talk about the past.
    “Three days ago you detected elevated neutrino emissions in a nebula in grid nine-eight-six. You thought it might be a way home. You were right. I've come to tell you to take
Voyager
back to that nebula—”
    “It was crawling with Borg!”
    “I've brought technology that will get us past them.”
    Magic from the future. Pretty damned convenient. Doubts raged in the captain's head. Nothing was this easy. Nothing good, anyway.
    “I don't blame you for being skeptical,” the admiral told her. “But if you can't trust yourself, who can you trust?”
    “For the sake of argument,” Janeway ventured, “let's say I believe everything you're telling me. This future you come from sounds pretty good.
Voyager'
s home, I'm an admiral, there are ways to defend against the Borg, my ready room even gets preserved for posterity—”
    “So why would you want to tamper with such a rosy time line? To answer that, I'd have to tell you more than you want to know.”
    Janeway glared at the admiral. There was no such thing as
more
than she wanted to know.
    The admiral leaned against the edge of the desk, her thigh meeting the desk at a familiar point on the muscle. Janeway found herself staring at the desk and the admiral's leg.
    “If you don't do what I'm suggesting,” the older woman pressed on, “it's going to take you another sixteen years to get home. And there are going to be casualties along the way.”
    The revelation was a punch in the gut. It was the voice of failure, of hopelessness and anticlimax. All her effort, her careful thoughts, her wakening nights wondering if she was doing the right thing day to day, minute by minute—to spend their best years rushing at high warp to an unhappy future.
    Unhappy? How did she know that? Nothing sounded so bad, nothing the admiral had said or implied . . . why, then, was the admiral here?
    Why would I be here? Why would I risk the futures of our crew and billions of others? No tampering with time came without ripples. Why is she here?
    Casualties . . . there were always casualties. Even if they had never left on this mission, never been thrown into the Delta Quadrant, even if they stayed in their hometowns there would be accidents. Life would still happen. There were diseases and troubles and random acts that might have taken them from each other. You didn't going around rearranging time to prevent the symphony of life from not exactly going your way. Why not? Because you didn't dare.
    I don't dare. Why does she?
    “I know exactly what you're thinking,” the admiral said, eyeing her with a posture of superiorizing that Janeway suddenly vowed to curb from now on.
    “You've also become a telepath?” she grumbled.
    The admiral nodded. “I used to be you, remember? You're asking yourself, is she really who she says she is or is this some kind of deception. For all you know, I could be a member of Species Eight Four Seven Two in disguise.”
    Annoyed, Janeway pressed a smile of irritation out of her lips. The other woman had her over a barrel. If all this was what it appeared to be, she was at a terrific disadvantage. If
she
had become a Starfleet admiral and she was really here talking to a superior officer, then Admiral Janeway had authority over her. If this were any other admiral than herself plucked out of time, what would her obligations be?
    But there was undeniable possessiveness born of the past seven unexpected years of