Ensign Vorik woke with a strange since of dread. Calmly, he analyzed the emotion, attempting to determine its origin and cause. Finding none, he dismissed it, rose and continued his morning routine, dressing and meditating before taking breakfast in the mess hall and then reporting for his duty shift. He found himself anticipating seeing the human ensign T’Loran and wondered at that. There was little to distinguish her from the countless other human females on the Voyager crew. She had dark blonde hair that she wore in a simple style. Her eyes were somewhat peculiar in that they were completely black instead of blue or green. She was intelligent, calm, logical, and spoke Vulcan fluently. Their conversation yesterday had helped to alleviate some of the longing for home he felt. He wondered if she played kal-toh and, if so, if she would be amendable to joining him in a game one evening. If her background were true and she had been raised on Vulcan, then he wished to learn more of her since wide experience brought an increase of wisdom — provided such experience was not sought purely for the stimulation of sensation, of course. Pushing aside his anticipation, Vorik continued to Engineering and took his place at the EPS monitor console.
“Odd,” he said softly as he checked the login information. It seemed that Ensign T’Loran had logged on to this very console at 0224. However, if his memory served him (and it rarely failed him), she was supposed to be on impulse control this shift. Indeed, she would not have been on the night shift at all since Alpha Shift was pulling doubles. He moved to the impulse control console and logged on from there. The strange feeling of dread returned.
“Ensign Vorik, what the hell are you doing at impulse control? Ensign Lauren is supposed to be there if she’d ever bother to grace us with her presence!” Lieutenant Torres shouted from across the room. “First she fails to turn up to cover for Darwin last night, leaving Suder in a lurch and now she’s not reporting in for her assigned duty shift. For someone who wants to emulate you Vulcans so much, you’d think she’d do a better job.”
“I believe she was here, Lieutenant,” Vorik said calmly. “The EPS console shows her as having logged on at 0224. She never logged off.”
“What? When I checked it with Suder earlier, it was blank.”
“Perhaps he showed you a screenshot of an unaccessed terminal,” Vorik offered. “With a few tweaks, it is easy enough to make it look active.” Vorik walked over to the console with the half-Klingon. Quickly, they pulled up the console’s event logs.
“Sure enough,” B’Elanna spat. “That’s exactly what the bastard did. But why?”
“I do not know,” Vorik said softly. “But I will begin investigating immediately.”
“You do that. I’ll have security go check Ensign Lauren’s quarters and pull the security monitors from last night. We also have something going on in the EPS conduits. It looks like there’s a physical interrupt in the circuits in conduit one four one. That’s what’s been keeping us from going to warp.”
“There is another interruption in the EPS on deck 11. I am attempting to localize it now,” Vorik said. “It seems to be in one of the Jefferies tubes near the Aft Lounge.”
“Oh my…,” he heard Torres shout from the upper part of Engineering where the EPS conduit access panels opened. “Lieutenant Tuvok, report to Engineering immediately and send a security team to check in on Ensign T’Loran in her quarters.”
“Acknowledged,” Vorik heard the security chief respond.
“Ensign T’Loran, please respond. This is Engineering to T’Loran, respond immediately if you are able.” Her comm badge chirped and Vorik heard her tap it.
“Yes?”
“This is security. There is no one in Ensign T’Loran’s quarters. We are sending people to check on her room-mates now.”
“Acknowledged. Is her comm badge there?”
“Affirmative. We heard you over it.”
“Great,” Torres muttered. “Is there any way we can do a bio-scan for her?” she asked aloud in Engineering. “Anything?”
“If we had some of her DNA, possibly,” one of the transporter specialists offered. “But I don’t think we have it on file off-hand.”
“Security,” Torres said, tapping her badge, “search her room and bring us a sample of her DNA if you can. A finger nail, a hair follicle, anything! Otherwise, we’re going to have to do a deck-by-deck search of the ship for her.”
“Understood,” came their reply.
Just then, Tuvok walked in to Engineering. Vorik followed him up to where Lieutenant Torres stood next to the open access panel. “Is there a problem, Lieutenant?” Tuvok asked. Torres gestured to the EPS conduit. The dark-skinned Vulcan bent down and, looking over him, Vorik could see the cause for her concern. A human body, badly burned, lay in the conduit. If Ensign T’Loran had suffered a similar fate, that could be why she was not responding to calls. However, Lieutenant Torres’s posture indicated that she suspected foul play and not an accident. The fact that someone had made it appear that Ensign T’Loran had not reported in last night to cover for Crewman Darwin and that they had apparently taken the trouble to return her comm badge to her quarters gave additional weight to that suspicion.
“With permission, Lieutenant, I would like to investigate the issue in the Aft Lounge,” Vorik said politely.
“Go ahead, Ensign,” Torres said absentmindedly. Tuvok was already calling for more security personnel to report to Engineering to help him secure the crime scene. Vorik took the tool-belt and the first-aid kit from the Engineering supply closet and hurried over to the Aft Lounge. He stopped before he reached it, opening the Jefferies tube access panel and crawling inside. Dragging the first-aid kit with him, he crawled along the tunnel. When he reached the section behind the Aft Lounge, he noticed that several of the EPS circuits were broken and stained with blood. The plasma flow had been disturbed. Blonde hairs were caught in some of the circuitry and the area had the strong smell of burned flesh. However, there was no body and not enough ash to indicate a complete disintegration. If Ensign T’Loran had been here, she was still here. He continued crawling through the tube, noting that there were splatters of blood and bloody handprints at regular intervals on the left-hand side. Vorik reached one of the junction closures and tapped the codes to open it. He frowned at what he saw when the panels parted.
T’Loran sat with her back against the far wall of the junction. Her head lolled and he could see that blood matted it and had run down the front of her uniform shirt, staining the gold. The sleeve on the left was burned away to nearly the shoulder and her left arm was badly burned, the flesh blackened and charred. She cradled her right arm against her body and he could tell that her right hand was swollen and had turned blue, indicating a bad fracture. Her uniform pants were torn and tattered in places. “Ensign?” he asked. Moving into the junction, he squatted down and felt for a pulse on her neck. He gave a sigh of relief when he found one though it was weak. Vorik gently lifted her chin to check her for further injuries. She had several bruises on her face and her throat had dark marks that looked like someone had tried to strangle her. Standing up so he could look over her, he winced at the massive wound he found at the base of her skull. There was no way he could move her to sickbay himself. He knelt back down and gathered her into his arms to make the emergency transport easier. Her silence was mildly worrying so he hurriedly tapped his comm badge.
“This is Ensign Vorik. Lock on to my signal and prepare for an emergency beam out of two directly to sick bay,” he said calmly when the transporter operator responded.
“Two?”
“That is correct.”
“Pattern-lock established. Transporting now.”
The Jefferies tube vanished and was replaced with sick bay. The Doctor and Lieutenant Tuvok were already there, standing over the bed in the surgical bay. Vorik and T’Loran materialized in the middle of the room. Their sudden appearance startled the EMH. Tuvok moved towards them with his normal calm demeanor. “What happened, Ensign?”
“I found her in the junction behind the Aft Lounge. She was unconscious and in this condition when I found her, Lieutenant. I called for an immediate emergency beam out as per standard procedure,” Vorik replied as the EMH swept in, calling for Kes to assist him. The EMH and Vorik moved carefully to lift the unconscious woman to one of the beds where the doctor began scanning her with a tricorder.
“And why were you looking for her, Ensign?” Tuvok asked.
“I was not looking for her specifically, Lieutenant. I was inspecting an intermittent disruption in the EPS near the Aft Lounge. Given that we had a nearly identical issue in conduit one four one that was caused by Crewman Darwin’s body interrupting the circuit, I thought something similar might be the case here. I took along the first-aid kit as a precaution and found Ensign T’Loran as I reported.”
“How long do you believe she had been in there?”
“Several hours, perhaps.”
“How do you believe she came to be injured?”
“I do not know, Lieutenant.”
“Well, she’s lucky that Mr. Vorik found her when he did,” the EMH said with the condescending tone he generally used whenever he was displeased about something. “Another few hours and she would have been dead.”
“What are the extent of her injuries, Doctor?” Tuvok asked.
“Four broken ribs, a punctured lung that is completely deflated, a compound fracture of the ulna and the radius in the right arm, a long and deep laceration from near the tip of her right ear to the base of her skull, severe burns on her left arm, bruising on her neck…wait, that’s not supposed to be there,” the doctor muttered. “Humans don’t have those.”
“Could any of these injuries be the result of an accident?” Tuvok asked.
“Maybe if she fell off a cliff. Are there any cliffs on Voyager?” the EMH snarled. “Kes, get me her medical records now! Ensign, you should go clean up and then report back to Engineering. Tell Lieutenant Torres that Ensign T’Loran will survive and will report for duty in a few days.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Vorik nodded. “Please, let me know when Ensign T’Loran wakes up.”
As instructed, Vorik returned to his quarters, changed out of his soiled uniform, and then returned to Engineering. He relayed the doctor’s report to Lieutenant Torres who stared at him, dumbfounded, as he delivered it with the same calmness that he would deliver a report on a holosimulation. “It has to be Suder,” Torres growled. “He was the only one in Engineering when Darwin came on and he’s the one who called me to tell me that Darwin had not come back from his dinner break and he couldn’t raise him. Dammit!” she swore. “I sent her right into his clutches. You’re certain she’ll be all right, Ensign?”
“The doctor indicated that her injuries were severe but not life-threatening and not beyond his capability to treat,” Vorik replied.
“I should have known that Suder was going to do something like this,” Torres snarled. She began pacing. Vorik stood at parade rest, his posture calm. He knew that humans and Klingons had some kind of inexplicable need to express their emotions verbally and to move. Suggestions that she calm herself and work through the problem logically would only increase her agitation. “That man gave me the creeps whenever we had to work together in the Maquis.”
“Crewman Suder has never done anything to give cause for concern,” Vorik pointed out. “Logically, you could not have known he would suddenly decide to attack two of his fellow crew members last night.”
“It’s like I told Tuvok just a bit ago,” she sighed. “Suder did his job with the Maquis a little too well.” Vorik raised an eyebrow at that. “Killing Cardassians,” she explained. “Normally, he was the typical Betazoid. Quiet, unassuming, kept to himself. Hell, half the time, he was practically invisible. But then we’d go into battle and Chakotay would have to pull him back, stop him from going too far. There were a few times when we were certain that Suder was going to kill one of us for stopping him,” she shuddered. “Those cold, black eyes of his… if they wind up being the last thing T’Loran sees in this life, I’m going to need someone to hold me back,” she growled.
“It is interesting that you have finally started pronouncing her name correctly, Lieutenant,” Vorik said mildly. “I am certain Ensign T’Loran will appreciate it when she returns to duty.”
“She’s really going to be all right?”
“The doctor seems to be of that opinion.”
“How the hell does a human wind up with a Vulcan name?”
“She said she was raised on Vulcan in the province of Raal. She speaks Vulcan fluently with the proper accent and she follows many of the teachings of our people. That leads me to believe that her claim is accurate though, as she admitted, the circumstances were somewhat unusual.”
“I always thought she was just one of those humans who wished she was a Vulcan,” Torres sighed. “She irritated me with her logic and the way she never smiled or got angry. She had that whole superior-Vulcan-attitude thing down to a fine art. Sometimes speaking with her was like speaking with a computer or you or Tuvok. No offense.”
“Forgive me, Lieutenant, but I fail to see how her ability to control her emotions or how her use of logic would lead you to believe that she felt herself superior to you. Ensign T’Loran called you well-informed and competent — hardly terms she would use for someone she considered inferior.”
“And all this time I’ve been calling her Lauren and trying to take her down a rung,” Lieutenant Torres winced. “She must be ready to hit me herself.”
“I believe the idea of programming the consoles to deliver a mild shock whenever someone called her that has crossed her mind,” Vorik said with a small grin, “but she takes no real offense as she knows none is intended.”
“You two must be good friends, then, if you know so much about her.”
“We are colleagues and we have spoken a few times. I learned much of this from her last evening. We are both…looking forward to seeing Vulcan again.”
“Let me know how she’s doing, would you, Ensign?” Torres asked. She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully as she stared out over the warp core.
“Of course, Lieutenant.”