Ship in a Bottle

Timeline: Icheb and Naomi's AU from "Shattered"/"Facets"

Sequel to "What You Wished For"

Stardate: 64176.7

For the umpteenth time Miral Torres Paris paused in front of the bookshelf in the family's living quarters and stared at the object sitting on the top shelf, in what her father called "the place of honor." The concept of honor had been drilled into Miral's brain for as long as she could remember, naturally. Her totally Human father, even more than her half-Klingon mother, had always emphasized its importance to anyone containing so much as a "drop" of Klingon blood (and Miral was a quarter Klingon, as he'd always reminded her), but she had never understood why this particular item warranted such a place in their home. Whenever she'd asked him about it, he'd said he'd explain later, when she was older.

Well, she WAS older. She was ten years old now (or almost, anyway). Her father wasn't around tonight, since he'd swapped shifts with Uncle Harry on the bridge this evening so the first officer could go on a date with Lieutenant Delaney. Miral decided to ask her mother instead, "Mom, do you think Daddy would let me work on finishing the Voyager in the bottle? It just needs the last nacelle to be attached, so I'm sure I can do it. Then he wouldn't need to find the time to finish it anymore."

Lieutenant Commander Torres looked up from her PADD and said, "It's not your father's place to finish it, Miral, so it isn't your place, either."

"What do you mean? Why wouldn't he finish building it when it's so close to being done?" Miral asked. When her mother didn't answer her quickly, Miral suddenly thought there might be another reason. "Is he saving it for when Voyager finally gets back to the Alpha Quadrant? Some sort of...you know...a symbol that the journey isn't finished yet?" Miral mentally patted herself on the back. She'd just learned about symbols in her Literature class and was pleased she could put that knowledge into practice. Her feeling of accomplishment was short-lived, however.

"Honey, it's not that." B'Elanna sighed as she stood up and put her arm around her daughter's shoulder. "The Voyager in the Bottle never belonged to him. One of our shipmates-Lieutenant Joe Carey-he was the one who built it as a souvenir of the trip. He meant to give it to his sons when he returned home to the Alpha Quadrant. He'd almost completed the project when he was killed. No one felt like moving Joe's possessions out oif his quarters right away. We didn't need his space until the Talaxians came on board and your friend Jaxia's family needed a place to live." B'Elanna hesitated for a moment and, to Miral's eyes, looked extremely sad before she added, "Your father didn't want to put Joe's project into storage, so he asked Mrs. Carey over Project Watson if we could keep it in our quarters until we could deliver it after we reached home. She agreed. Joe was a good friend to me, Miral. He was my second in command in Engineering. I miss him, but whenever I look at his ship in the bottle, I feel like he's still here with us in a way."

"I never heard that story before. Why didn't Daddy say anything whenever I asked him about it? I wouldn't have kept asking him if I knew it hurt him when I did."

"That's okay, honey. It's just that your father has never forgiven himself for agreeing to send Joe on that mission to find the Friendship One probe."

"I remember studying about that probe in my History class, but I never heard about any mission to find it. Did you?"

"We have a few pieces in Cargo Bay One."

"Can I see them?"

"The pieces are still very radioactive. All I could show you would be the protective housing, so there isn't that much to see. If you wish, I'll ask your father, but like I said, he still feels guilty about agreeing to the mission. I think that's why he never told you that story. He's always said that if we hadn't lost Captain Janeway, we never would have lost Joe. She would have turned down that mission."

Miral sat down on the couch next to her mother. "When did this happen? If it was before Jaxia's family came on board, I must not have been born yet."

"Yes, it was a few months before you were born. Since the planet was so radioactive and I was pregnant, your father wouldn't let me join the away team. Joe volunteered to go in my place, and…" Briefly, B'Elanna told the story of the ill-fated mission to retrieve the probe which had been sent out of Earth's solar system in the heady days after warp travel was discovered, to announce humanity's joining the space faring peoples of the galaxy. Meant as a gesture of friendship and good will, the probe had crash landed on a world whose inhabitants had no idea how dangerous the material used to propel the device through space could be. The planet's atmosphere was poisoned and its people almost obliterated as a species before Voyager arrived. With the Voyager crew's assistance, a method devised by a scientist of that people was launched to undo much of the damage. Although the atmosphere began to clear and the first steps towards the restoration of the world's environment had commenced before the ship left orbit, B'Elanna Torres' engineering department had lost a key member of its staff.

"But if Voyager hadn't come there, the people living on that planet would all have died?" MIral asked.

"That's true, but losing Joe the way we did was so senseless. To be murdered by that paranoid, so-called leader...your father blamed himself, even though he couldn't have known what that madman would do when we were offering food and medicine to help his people. I hope it was just that radiation sickness had clouded his mind."

"What happened to the person who killed Lieutenant Carey?"

"We don't know, Miral. We left the system before finding out what they did about him. I'm not sure I care what happened to him, actually, but whatever punishment they may have chosen to impose, he deserved it, and more. But now that you know what happened, you won't have to wonder about why we have the ship in the bottle on our shelf, or why it's unfinished."

"No. I won't ask Daddy about it anymore." Miral glanced up at the bottle on the shelf and sighed before confiding to her mother, "You know, sometimes I look up at it on the shelf and feel like I'm a tiny little person who lives inside a bottle. We're flying through space and I almost never get to go out into nature and enjoy being on a planet. Maybe that ship is a kind of symbol of living inside a starship."

For the first time since this conversation began, B'Elanna smiled broadly at her daughter. "Maybe so, but at least we have the holodeck! If we want, we can visit all sorts of places right here in our 'bottle' of a ship. More than we could if we traveled from planet to planet, because time and space are no barrier to us."

"We can! Maybe being inside a ship in a bottle isn't so terrible after all."

B'Elanna sat down on the couch, with her daughter cuddled up next to her, and picked up her PADD to review the fuel consumption reports she'd been working on before Miral had interrupted her. But she had to endure one more interruption.

"Does this mean you're willing to join Daddy and me the next time we play Captain Proton? You'd be a great Queen Arachnia."

Voyager's Chief Engineer sighed deeply and told her daughter, "We'll see."

B'Elanna's internal dialog was quite different: 'Don't count on it.'