Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

of you.”
    * * *
    Tom Paris had never seen so much activity on the engineering deck. He went there to chase his wife, who shouldn't even be on duty, never mind flogging dozens of crewmen into hurrying with what amounted to alien technology being fitted into
Voyager
's systems. Even as he stepped through the doors, he could tell she was overdoing—even before he saw her. He could hear her voice snap through the air.
    “I don't want the whole system crashing because of one faulty relay. Install new ones!”
    “Yes, ma'am,” some poor schlock responded.
    Paris paused and shook his head. Usually it was hard to believe there were more than ten people on the ship, never mind most of them crowded into one deck, running around with parts and installation tools and enviro-suits, practically crawling on top of each other. Add to that the idea that his wife could bark them all into quivering submission while carrying their child— and some men thought
their
lives were weird.
    “And I need an update on the inductor capacitance—”
    “B'Elanna . . .”
    “This time don't make me wait more than five minutes. I have to report to the captain
and
to the admiral. My least favorite report is ‘I don't know yet, ma'am.’ Clear?”
    “B'Elanna, this is your husband calling . . . anybody home?” Paris strode up to her and tilted into her periphery.
    “Shouldn't you be on the bridge?” she snapped.
    He pulled her to a more secluded area and fielded the glances of the busy crewmen hurrying around them. “Is there something wrong with the pilot's requesting a systems report from the chief engineer?”
    “The last report I got was that the comm system was working perfectly.”
    “Okay, you caught me,” he admitted with a shrug. “I'm checking up on you.”
    What kind of husband would he be if he didn't? Red alert and all, Borg cubes, nebulae, admirals . . . Maybe the two of them should settle down on some nice asteroid with their baby, build a cottage, plant a garden, and tell the captain to just come back for them through some other temporal notch later on.
    “I'm fine,” she said, managing a halfhearted smile. His concern seemed to ease her clutter of concerns and frustrations.
    “Your back?”
    “I'm ignoring it.”
    “I'd offer you a massage, but then eveyone would probably want one.”
    The smile broadened. “You know,” she murmured, “for a Starfleet flyboy, you're pretty sweet.”
    Paris returned the smile. Now that he had managed to relax her a little, he glanced around at all the work happening around them. “So how's it going?”
    She shook her head in admiration. “This armor technology the admiral brought—it's incredible! I hate to sound like Harry, but we might actually make it this time.”
    Paris took note of her words, but what he really paid attention to was her tone. “Why don't you seem happy about that?” he asked.
    “I am happy . . . it's just . . . I'd gotten used to the idea of raising the baby on
Voyager.
But now . . . I might end up delivering her at Starfleet Medical instead of sickbay.”
    As he watched her expression, his shoulders sagged a little. Boy, this was one schizophrenic crew. Sometimes they wanted to go home, sometimes they were already home—
    “That wouldn't be so bad, would it?” he pursued.
    “Not as long as you're there with me. And I want the Doctor. Not some stranger.”
    “You'd have to take him off-line to keep him away.”
    When faced with the facts of how many people truly cared about them and their baby, maybe the idea that she was giving birth on behalf of the whole ship's complement, B'Elanna smiled again, this time more sincerely. “If we do make it home, where do you think we'll live?”
    “We can always stay with my parents for a while—ooooh, you're right. Bad idea.”
    “Of course,” she said, “it probably doesn't matter to you anyway. You flyboys are all the same. You'll probably take the first piloting assignment that comes along and leave me to change diapers.”
    He grinned at the idea—not of leaving, but of his half-Klingon wife patting powder on a little moon. “Not a chance.”
    * * *
    “Come in.”
    Kathryn Janeway hardly noticed the door chime until it rang for the third time. She was bent over her desk monitor, reviewing graphic after graphic of Borg cubes. As if it helped . . .
    She knew the cubes well enough from the inside as well as out, yet somehow they just got more complicated, not less, like a swamp that was