Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

trial and isolation. Reflex insisted she should retain complete command here, she must. This had to remain her ship until
Voyager
could be delivered to the Alpha Quadrant.
    “Have your people examine my shuttle,” the admiral said, reading her mind again. “Tell them to take a close look at the weapons systems and the armor technology. In the meantime, the Doctor can confirm my identity.”
    Such precautions made sense, but also seemed like colossal wastes of precious time. If Janeway believed her own protests about not wanting to know the future, then the wise thing to do would be to pack this admiral back on her shuttle and stuff her through that rift. Get rid of the temptation. The longer the admiral stayed here, the more the chance for contamination. Keeping her here, examining her, her shuttle—those were risks in and of themselves. The crew would begin to know what was going on. The technicians would log their encounters with whatever was on that shuttle. They would never forget. Tricorders all over the ship would have recorded information. Other than throw such a resource overboard, Janeway couldn't deny the plain fact that she would process and use the information. Any other course of action would be prohibitively cautious. It would be like having a tin of water in a lifeboat. Sooner or later, she would drink.
    “We'll call you ‘admiral,’ ” she told the other woman, “and we'll show you all the respect you seem to be due. You know the future and I don't. For all I know, you could be mentally deranged.”
    “Pretty picture,” the admiral shot back.
    “We all get old,” Janeway had ready. “Sometimes infirmities come. Don't you think I know that?”
    The admiral said, “You're pretending to be unaffected by me. I know when you're not being honest. We're the same person—”
    “We
used
to be the same person. When you came through that rift, we became two people. You look like me, and we have a common past. We're just like any set of twins now. Our future may not be common at all. Mine is yet to happen and I have to play the game that way.”
    “The survivors of
Voyager
deserve better than what they got,” the admiral said. This time she was angry.
    Captain Janeway gestured to the corridor entrance, inviting the admiral to make good on her claims. “We're not survivors yet. We haven't made land.”
    * * *
    Seven of Nine sat at the helm of the admiral's shuttle in the starship's bay. Sensations of concern plagued her. What would the captain decide?
    Seven was uneasy, though she battled for control. Things were about to change again. In her life, the changes had all been serious, dramatic, sudden and encompassing. Assimilation by the Borg, then life as a drone for many years, ruptured by discovery of her individual self, the little girl so long erased—of late she had not only accepted human individuality but begun to explore it. And now she was seeking the great prize of individuality, the fulfillment lauded in literature and in the eyes of her fellow human beings—a bond of romance and devotion with another human being.
    “The armor appears to be autoregenerative,” she reported, watching the data scroll before her on the small screens. She worked the controls, changing the graphics to the “armored” stage. “When the system is enabled, specialized nanites reconfigure the molecular structure of the hull to form ablative layers.”
    The process was not unlike Borg adaptation techniques. Nanites read the surroundings, then changed to accommodate them.
    “The armor's just the tip of the iceberg.” B'Elanna Torres spoke from the rear of the shuttle's interior, where she crouched with a correlative analysis tricorder on the technology back there. “She's got omnispectral stealth technology and some sort of transphasic photon torpedoes—” Her voice cut off as she struggled out of her crouch, her body betraying both balance and grace. She moved forward to the helm and scanned the pilot's headrest. “And this . . . I'm guessing it's a neural interface. But I couldn't begin to tell you how it works. Of course, there's one thing this vessel isn't equipped for.” She squeezed between the seats and added, “A pregnant crewman.” Looking down at her primary problem, she knocked and said, “It's time to come out now.”
    “Ideally,” Seven said, “the child won't be born until Thursday at twelve hundred hours.”
    B'Elanna gawked at her.
“You
joined the baby pool?”
    “I'm