Star Trek Voyager: Childhood

Chapter 1

The next morning I was woken up by a group of toddlers jumping up and down on my bed and shking me violently.  I groaned and buried my head deeper into the pillows, unfortunately that only works for so long.

"Come on Miral!  Get up!  I'm hungry!"  Putal shouted  as she landed on my legs.  I grunted in pain, she may have only be five but she was pretty strong and heavy, I guess it came from the combination of being part Borg and Vulcan.

"Ughhhh!  Why are you up this early?  Isn't it regeneration time for you guys, I'm pretty sure you haven't regenerated all week becuase you talked the babysitters into letting you stay up you made them believe that you don't need to regenerate anymore."  I sat up glaring at them as they smiled sheepishly.

"Not our fault!" Protested Arnad with his usual cheeky smirk and I rolled my eyes.  He had been spending way too much time around the Academy freshmen, he was getting more than a little too cocky.

"How exactly is it not your fault?  You're the one who refused to regenerate.  When you get a lecture from the doctor I am not giving you an excuse to get out of it."  I looked pointedly at him and heaved myself out of bed, grabbing my clothes before shutting and locking the bathroom door behind me.  "Feel free to explain by the way, I can hear you."

"Well, you shouldn't have left us with a babysitter who was that gullible or that stupid.  You know what we're like, you should have learnt from last time, why didn't you hire Naomi or Icheb again?  They know better than to let us get away with that." 

"Firstly, I suggest you stop talking like that before you get to the Academy and Admiral Paris gives you so many detentions you'll be at the Academy 'til you're thirty.  And secondly, Icheb and Naomi are busy, the project is three weeks behind since a group of Jem'Hadar decided to leave them a...gift in the engine room.  It takes time to repair an anti-matter explosion, and the ship has to be ready to go in five days.  There's no one else I can get that doesn't fall for it because all of the best officers within 100 light-years are on the ship."   I finished pinning up my hair into my usual braided bun and opened the bathroom door.

I walked downstairs to discover that they had tried to fix breakfast themselves.  And now there was food all over the floor, the replicator was broken and the twins were covered in cereal and needed a sonic shower.  I rolled my eyes and pressed the com panel on the kitchen wall,

"Annika!  Get your lazy ass out  of bed, I need your help now.  I think Putal got at the replicator with the twins again."

"I told you we needed to put stronger security measures on that thing, but do you ever listen?  Noooo...because you're one and a half years older you think you know better.  I'm getting changed now, they took my uniform.  I'll be down in ten to get the twins ready and make sure everyone else is changed, you sort out breakfast and we should still make it to the dock in time to start our shift."

"I know, we're working late again so I got a new babysitter.  I've left instructions for him about how to look after them, hopefully we won't come home to see the babysitter asleep and them making a huge mess of the house."

I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and fixed a new breakfast for everyone.  I ate mine quickly and packed everyone's schoolbags.  By the time I was done with that, Annika had all of the little ones downstairs, dressed and eating breakfast.  We got the seven of them on to the bus first, then I set off the alarm upstairs to wake up Max while I read through my personal messages on my PADD. 

A group of Jem'Hadar had engineered a little breakout and were currently at large, so the whole of Starfleet was advised to be on the lookout for them.  Especially those of us working somewhere with a supply of Ketracel White.  There was also one from Admiral Paris reminding everyone to stay calm during the security drill in three days.  Those of us working on the ship were told to keep going, she needed to be deployed soon in order to make it to the astronomical phenomenon in time to collect the right data.

Half an hour later Max finally dragged himself down the stairs, I handed him his latte in his flask and we headed down to the transporter pad, none of us had a driver's license yet, Max was the eldest at 17, not that it showed by his behaviour but he had to wait until his 18th birthday to take lessons.

They'd tightened the rules up after there were a few incidents, but we don't usually talk about it.  We beamed into work and then went our separate ways.  Annika had to go to the bridge where she was wiring up the navigation panel, the last engineer had screwed it up, holo-simulations had shown that if she hadn't caught it in time then they would have ended up flying straight into the New Berlin.

Max was down in astrometrics downloading and checking all of the data files to make sure that the data collected was accurate.  They were going to observe a star going supernova, in theory the information could help scientists pinpoint exactly when out sun would die and it could help them work out whether or not it would be possible to stop it.

I was going down to engineering, I had to repair the damage to the warpcore that the bomb left, my team had a lot of repair work to do, the bomb had torn through most of the consoles and the resulting half-core breach had shorted circuited half of the systems and destroyed most of the panels and access routes in the surrounding corridors.  Thankfully one of the night shift on the bridge had managed to stop it before it became a serious problem, a few crewmembers were still in sickbay but there were no fatalities and the crewmen were set to make a quick recovery.

"Morning Miral, you're right on time.  I need to you to repair the bio-neural gel pack ports in Jefferies Tube 25, well to be honest I need you to work out how to open Tube 25 without a phaser because the spare antimatter was stashed in there before the explosion."  I smiled at a stressed Chief O'Brien, as he scanned the room looking out for any potential problem.

"I'm on it Chief.  Are you feeling okay you don't look to good,"  I looked at him carefully and noticed a familiar tear at his shoulder.  "Did you even go home last night?  I'm pretty sure that's the tear from yesterday when it got caught on part of the turbolift at Level 1.  That's really not healthy Sir."

"I'll be fine, we need to get this ship out soon and there's still a lot to do."  I sighed and nodded knowing that he wouldn't pay any attention .  I needed to work out how to open those damn doors, without weapons, while the circuitry was fried this was going to be a fun 12 hours.