A Star Trek: Voyager Short Story
By Adrian Hilton
To my wife and J/C muse, Jie, for making everything worth while. She provided the inspiration for this story; I just wrote it.
Tom Paris rarely found himself enjoying time in Sickbay, and today was no exception. His duties as the Doctor's new medical assistant seemed to incorporate everything menial and seldom anything of interest. This day's roster, for example, had him cataloguing the progress of a tasty selection of moulds growing on agar plates. These were stuck in the dark in one of the Doctor's cupboards which should have been labelled "Experiments which I ought to look at but really don't interest me enough to divert my attention from more challenging tasks".
His nose wrinkling, Tom reflected on how much better life would be as a hologram without a sense of smell. Perhaps this was one of the Doctor's aims in giving him this task - the least noxious of the moulds smelled like a Klingon jockstrap after a six day battle, and Tom's inspection required his face to be practically pressed into the agar to see the detail required.
The Doctor, humming a happy aria while running through a rapid maintenance routine on a biobed monitor, seemed oblivious to the occasional retching noises that came from the cupboard.
"You know, Mr. Paris," he remarked, "there are few greater pleasures in a doctor's life than time spent in an empty surgery." Clearly I don't count then Tom thought, quietly grinding his teeth. "I must be doing my job perfectly, because nobody's sick or injured." Or at least, not sick or injured enough to make them put up with you. "Even the crew coming in this morning are all coming in for prophylactic treatment or checks." A gramme of prevention buys a kilo of cure - from choral poisoning.
"Doc," Tom finally protested, "this is too much. What the heck are these plates for? I swear, they can't have been touched since we entered the Delta Quadrant."
"Not a bad estimate, Mr. Paris," the Doctor smiled. "In fact, they're from my predecessor here. He must have started the experiments shortly before Voyager set off for the Badlands."
"So why do you care about them?" Sickbay work was bad enough, but Sickbay make-work would be just intolerable.
"Oh, I don't know," the Doctor shrugged. "You never know when these things might come in useful. I was curious as to what had evolved on those plates."
"Do you know how foul these things smell?" Tom asked, aggrieved. "Couldn't you just throw them away? Hey, didn't you at least think about the possibility that they could yield a virus capable of wiping out half of the ship?"
"Surely, Mr. Paris, you appreciate the distinction between a virus and a bacterium?" the Doctor asked jovially. "Besides, if that had been the case you'd have found this out by now. Don't worry," he added hastily as Tom started to growl, "you're in excellent hands should this unfortunate eventuality occur."
"I'm sure," snarled Tom, "and when you asked the Captain for my services, I don't suppose the words 'guinea pig' featured in the conversation at all?"
The Doctor raised a declamatory finger, took an unnecessary breath, and winked out.
Tom, taken aback by the sudden disappearance, replaced the plate he'd been working on and walked into the Doctor's office.
"Doc?" No response. "Hey, doc, this isn't funny." A silent retort. "C'mon, do you expect me to start looking behind the biobeds?" The Doctor's reply was conspicious by its absence.
Tom tapped out a few commands on the main console. Receiving no satisfactory response, he resorted to verbal commands. "Computer, reactivate Emergency Medical Hologram."
The Doctor shimmered into view in the middle of Sickbay. Relieved, Tom started towards him. "Hey Doc, what was all that about?"
"Thank you for activating the Emergency Medical Hologram version 4.036 beta," the Doctor chirped, in a voice quite unlike his normal tone. "We regret that this program has reached the end of its license period. Should you wish to continue to receive the medical services of this hologram, we politely request that you contact EMH Programming Services, 2654 Geary Street, San Francisco, Earth, in order to obtain programming updates and security fixes for your program." A holographic illuminated plate blinked into existence, its winking border framing a written copy of this information. The Doctor stood there frozen, his face split by a cheesy grin.
Tom walked up to the hologram and waved his hand through the Doctor's face, twice. Normally enough to provoke holograhic fury, this yielded not the slightest reaction. He walked around the hologram looking for clues, but nothing changed other than the blinking sign.
Tom hit his combadge. "Paris to Cap..." He reconsidered. "Paris to Torres".
A pause. "Torres - what's up, Tom?"
"B'Elanna - have you got a spare five minutes?" He felt dumb even asking the question, a feeling confirmed immediately in no uncertain terms by the Chief Engineer.
"OK, OK," he eventually soothed her, "I appreciate you're run off your feet. But I'd really appreciate it if you could drop by Sickbay in the next half hour. You could just about save my skin."
"Why would I want to do that?" B'Elanna asked, apparently genuinely bewildered. Tom realised that this was a desperate situation requiring desperate measures.
"My holodeck privs for the next week are up for grabs."
"This is for attending, not conditional on any subsequent work, right?" It wasn't really a question.
"Just get here, B'Elanna." Tom knew, even as he signed off, that she had him over a barrel.
"That's interesting," B'Elanna said thoughtfully thirty minutes later. "Looks like we've got a licence expiration problem."
"I didn't need an engineer to tell me that," Tom groused.
"And yet you spent a week's holodeck time to get one. Don't know how you got to be an Ensign." B'Elanna gave the console a thorough pummelling. "OK, I'm not going to solve this in the next five minutes, or even the next hour. It'll be end of day before I can spare the compute cycles to crack the licence key."
"Can't we just fake a credit system front end and tie the Sickbay system into it?" Tom asked hopefully.
B'Elanna looked thoughtful. "Hmm. While we're at it, can't we rig up something involving photo sensors and a neural net to steer the ship around any stars in our way?"
"You could do that?" Tom asked, impressed.
"You tell me, Helmboy, you're the pilot around here. But hey, I wouldn't presume to tell a pilot how to steer a ship." She glared at him.
"Noted," Tom winced. B'Elanna completed downloading data to a memory stick and pulled it out of the console.
"Sickbay's all yours, flyboy." She winked, and strode out of the room. Over her shoulder she threw a last thought. "We'll talk about fixing fees later..."
"I bet we will," Tom muttered. He started scrolling through the unencrypted parts of the Doctor's logs to try to work out what needed doing next.
Twenty minutes later found Tom working past the end of his official Sickbay shift, trying desperately to keep up with the Doctor's work schedule. He knew that it would be just like Chakotay to check that Sickbay was running smoothly, and to drop by if he thought anything was out of the ordinary.
The schedule was punishing, and Tom was gaining increasing respect for the Doctor. Perhaps this is his plan, he thought briefly, before dismissing the idea. The Doctor he knew wouldn't let himself be kept out of circulation for even ten minutes, even if he knew that some Paris humiliation could be obtained as a result.
Tom's focus on the ongoing maintenance activities at the expense of the day's schedule was understandable. It was therefore understandable that he didn't notice the Captain's entrance into Sickbay for a good thirty seconds. Equally understandable was the Captain's confusion when she failed to spot the Doctor - the licence expiration message having disappeared after ten minutes of display - or indeed Tom Paris, as the latter was crouched by an access panel in the corner trying to get a balky network switch to reset.
"Doctor?" she enquired, sticking her head into the Doctor's office in a vain attempt to locate him.
Tom Paris, hearing this, cursed very quietly and brought up Sickbay's schedule on his PADD. Sure enough, there was the Captain at sixteen hundred hours, due for a...
"What the hell?" he said out loud.
The Captain had short legs, but was with him in less than four strides. "Mr. Paris? Where's the Doctor? And what are you doing here? I thought your shift ended twenty minutes back?"
Tom rapidly considered a range of possible answers. The one he settled on was "Err..."
The Captain spotted what was on his PADD. Her eyes narrowed. Tom had been around her long enough to know that this was rarely a good sign for anyone in the vicinity. He gulped
"I think that you and I ought to have a talk." Janeway took Tom by the arm, her grip not quite breaking skin, and walked him to the Doctor's office.
"Licence expiry?" The Captain was not quite spluttering, but there wasn't much in it.
"Yes ma'am." Tom had resorted to the yes-ma'am, no-ma'am, three-bags-full-ma'am school of response. He figured that, at the least, it would put a choke on his leaking information that he didn't want public.
The Captain said three words, two of which Tom didn't know the meaning of, and one that he wished he didn't. "B'Elanna's on this, you say?"
"Yes ma'am, she hopes to have something by the end of the day." Tom decided not to reveal at what cost, mostly because he didn't know how much she'd demand. He suspected that it would be more than he could spare. Although, given what he'd just learned, it was unlikely he would have much use for the Holodeck. Access from the brig was, after all, quite limited.
Not as limited as if he were jettisoned out of the nearest airlock, of course.
Janeway seethed for a while, and Tom wisely left her to it. Then she appeared to make up her mind. "Well, there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube."
"Ma'am?"
"If the Doctor's out of service, and you're in on the conspiracy, I'm just going to have to get you to take over." She gave him the up-and-down stare that made his kidneys feel as if they were being microwaved. "You can do what's required, I hope? I'd look pretty stupid if it turned out I'd put someone in Sickbay who couldn't use the equipment."
"Yes, ma'am," Tom offered nervously, "I know how to apply the chromatophaser." Never actually used it though, his treacherous inner voice whispered. But hey, she's only the Captain. What's the worst that she can do to you? He wished that voice would just shut it. It was giving him ideas and they weren't enjoyable ones.
Janeway sat herself on the end of a biobed. "Well come on then, Mr. Paris. Do your worst. I can't wait much longer, or Commander Chakotay is going to start noticing and we wouldn't want that." She tilted her chin head in thought. "Unless we changed his replicator program's parameters for his contact lens replication." Tom stared at her. "That was a joke, Tom."
"Yes, ma'am." Tom picked up the chromatophaser and came behind the Captain. He had no idea what to set it too, but a quick investigation revealed a preset program "Janeway 1" that looked promising. But it wasn't the only preset program in there...
"Wildman 1?" he said, half-incredulous. "Neelix 1 through 7?" Well, that wasn't so much of a surprise. "And what the..."
"If you've quite finished invading the privacy of my crew, Mr. Paris," came the steel-edged voice of Janeway, "perhaps you can just select 'Janeway 1' and get to work."
"Ma'am." Tom activated the phaser, narrowed the beam down and carefully aimed it as if his life depended on it. Which it may well have done.
"GDMFPOS!" B'Elanna only needed one vowel to articulate her distress with the EMH licensing system, but she made use of plenty of consonants. "Haven't these p'takhs ever heard of code reuse?" She was tapping all over a large display in engineering which showed about three hundred concurrent decryption runs in progress.
"It's good security though, isn't it?" asked a crewman timorously. "If we can't break it, they must be doing something right?" B'Elanna glared at him.
"Only because we don't yet have their algorithm. When we do, I'm going to tear that piece of targ crap into tiny pieces, then when we get back to San Francisco I'm going to stand on the rooftop of Starfleet HQ and write the decryption program onto the side of the Golden Gate bridge with my phaser." Then I'm going to find the guy who thought he'd be clever with this algorithm, and make him wish he'd stuck to using AES-3.
"Janeway to Torres."
B'Elanna sighed. "Captain?"
"How's it looking?" B'Elanna was glad her commanding officer wasn't idiot enough to ask whether she'd broken it yet.
"Sorry captain, we don't have a way in yet. I'm pretty confident we can break it in under an hour once we have the algorithm, but we've not got very far with this." She paused. "Everything OK?"
There was a pause on the other end of the comm link. "Yes, it's OK. He's quite good, in fact. Maybe we have ourselves a new, ah, member of the group."
"This I must see," said B'Elanna wryly, walking away from the group of engineers. She lowered her voice. "Does he know about anyone else?"
"Most people," Janeway confirmed. "We can trust him to be discreet, of course."
"Of course." B'Elanna knew she could trust Tom to look after his own skin, and knew that he knew that any leak of information like this would mean him and that skin parting company.
This afternoon had proven eye-opening for Tom Paris. Three other women on the crew had been in after the Captain, each one taken aback to find Tom in Sickbay, and much more distressed to discover that he knew about their programs. He had spent much more time placating them than applying the chromatophaser.
Eventually he was too tired to keep going, and set the Sickbay scheduler to inform the crew than only emergency cases were to be admitted. He stumbled wearily back through the corridors towards his room. Halfway there, though, he changed his mind and headed for a different door.
Harry Kim was surprised at Tom's visit. "Aren't you supposed to be asleep?" he asked, ushering Tom in and pointing him at a couch. "You look shattered. Coffee?"
"Black," Tom confirmed. "It's been quite a day." He outlined what had happened with the Doctor. Harry listened intently.
"4.036 beta?" he asked at the end, amused.
"Yeah, that's going to give me some mileage in the next week," Tom smirked. "But that's not the best part. Do you know what I found out when the Captain arrived and the Sickbay scheduler decrypted her appointment details?" He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "It's not really red."
"What?" Harry was confused.
"Her hair, Harry. It's not really red. Every two months she has to come to the Doctor to get it chromatophased into red."
"No!" Harry was shocked, or at least acting well. "What colour is it then?"
"I don't know," Tom admitted, ""
FINIS
By Adrian Hilton
No copyright infringement of Paramount's Star Trek: Voyager series is intended; this story is in appreciation of the universe that Star Trek has opened up to the world for the past 30 years.
This story is released under the OpenContent License version 1.0.