Meet Lt. Zariel Sindile, temporarily assigned to Voyager for its rescue mission in the Badlands. Now she's stuck in the Delta Quadrant, her children are at home without her, she has no one to depend on, and her darkest secret is about to be laid ba...
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Stardate 51482.3
Michael Sindile had the hammer down, and he made the sixty minute drive from his great-grandparents' house to the Ole Miss campus in forty-five minutes, his mind still reeling. He had still been at home rather than at school, because he had first block off, one of the perks of senior year, when the call had come in from Starfleet Headquarters. He had had to ask the pretty Betazoid lady to repeat her news three times before it sank in, which she had obligingly done, her bottomless dark eyes kind. After she'd disconnected, he had tried every possible way to contact Patrick, but then remembered that his brother had the last of his semester exams that morning, and would have deactivated all his comms. Michael had then scrawled a note for his Mamaw that merely read, Gone to Oxford, will call, and torn out of the driveway as though the Jem'Hadar were chasing him.
The entire way to Oxford he desperately tried to remember which of his brother's classes might be testing today, and which building they might be in. Coming up blank, he finally just screeched into a satellite parking lot, whipped into a parking space, dove out of his truck and pelted as fast as he could to his brother's room in the dorm. After pounding on Patrick's door and hollering for a time and deciding that Patrick was not just ignoring him, he tore off to the center of campus. He vaguely remembered that Patrick would have some classes in the psychology building, and some in the biology building, so for half an hour he frenetically paced a route that would allow him to watch the egress from both Peabody and Coulter, as well as the sidewalk leading to Patrick's dorm.
On one of his turns past the Union, however, he finally spotted Patrick, in the middle of a group of his friends, heading that direction. Michael began yelling while they were still at least fifty meters away. "Voyager called! I mean Starfleet called! I mean, this lady from Starfleet called, she said they heard from Voyager! They sent their doctor to the Romulan border!"
Patrick stopped in front of Michael, and said, "You are not makin' a lick of sense. Why aren't you at school?"
Michael was still in warp drive. "They heard from Voyager!!"
Whatever Patrick had been expecting to hear on the repeat, it wasn't that. His mouth dropped open in shock. "What? Slow it down, man. What are you talking about?"
Michael took a deep breath. "Okay. I was just about to leave for second block, and a lady from the Bureau of Starfleet Personnel called. She asked if I was a relative of Zariel Sindile, and I said I was her son, and she told me! Voyager found this communications relay that reached all the way here, and they couldn't get a transmission through it, but they could get a holographic subroutine through, so they sent their EMH to this Starfleet ship near the Romulan border, and he called Starfleet Command." He'd managed to start out slowly enough, but by the end of this second recap, he was back in warp drive.
