Janeway Ambushed in a Passageway and Torres Finds the Answer
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Star Trek: Voyager - Invasion #4: The Final Fury
By Dafydd ab Hugh
ISBN: 0671541811
Chapter 17 opens with Janeway stalking blind and furious down a passageway after the holodeck disaster. Chakotay yanks her arm. She snaps into a defensive posture ready to put someone on the deck. It is her first officer, not an assassin.
“Are you back from the land of spirits?”
She is embarrassed. She was thinking. Hard. Torres, Carey, and she cannot crack the moon. Either they lack the energy or the target will not absorb enough to fry itself. Chakotay tries light humor about her judo. She is not in the mood, but it works a little. Her father taught her ancient Japanese judo. Turn the enemy’s power against himself. Usually she just gets him off balance and rabbit-punches him.
Then Chakotay says the line that matters. Too bad you cannot use that on the moon. Turn its own power against it.
Janeway’s eyebrows go up. She calls him engineering impaired and means it affectionately. She cannot see the exact method yet. But it is something to try.
Chakotay has a second idea from talking to Redbay about the terror projector. Wedge the shields so they can detect the beam for a split second and dodge left or right. He demonstrates with his hands like the prow of an old ship. Janeway likes the martial arts angle. Unfortunately neither of them knows how to bend shield geometry without getting the ship killed.
She sends Chakotay to Carey with Tuvok in tow. Carey knows biotech shields better than Torres, who thinks shields are for cowards. Janeway needs Torres on the bridge side of this. She also tells Chakotay nobody gets out alive. They just need to survive long enough to destroy the moon.
The Tuvok and Carey scene is comedy gold with stakes. Carey expects Tuvok to confirm the wedge is impossible. Chakotay asks Tuvok to be overly detailed and pedantic instead. Vulcans do not lie. They creatively avoid the truth. Tuvok cites Admiral Anton Wilson’s seminal work on shield geometry and sends Carey to read the actual article, not the abstract. “If it is not found there, it is not found anywhere.” Chakotay drags Tuvok away before he confesses.
Meanwhile Janeway and Torres stare at a holodeck mockup of the moon cabling from Kim and Paris’s expedition. Torres insists they are guessing. Janeway says guesses are all they have. Tuvok drops the Red Queen line about six impossible things before breakfast. Janeway finishes the Alice quote. B’Elanna snaps that she is not Alice and this is not the looking-glass.
Then everything changes.
Torres goes quiet. “This is really weird.” She can feel the power flow. That cable bundle is feedback control. Her hands move through a ritual mapping energy in her head. Kahless the Unforgettable. She almost never uses Klingon expressions in front of Janeway. Now she says they can reroute the flow and blow up the whole moon.
Logically? No. But she can feel it. She cannot put the plan into words yet. She will have to do it herself. Janeway puts her in charge of the away team.
Tuvok blocks Janeway from going. Chakotay is a fine XO but does not know this ship like she does. Torres needs a pilot who can fly a shuttle through that shaft. Not Paris. Redbay. Tuvok read his record. He can probably outfly Paris. Do not tell Paris.
The chapter ends on two threads. Janeway orders Redbay found and Torres to the shuttle bay by 0430. Neelix hovers outside sickbay, terrified of telling Kes that Janeway is right about destroying the moon and twenty-seven billion people. He crashes into the Doctor, cracks his knee, and still cannot find the words.
What I like here is the pivot. The book spent a full chapter proving brute force fails. This chapter says use the enemy’s strength against them, twice, shields and power routing. Torres’s intuition breakthrough feels earned because she has been staring at the problem for hours. And Tuvok picking Redbay over Paris is a quiet character beat that pays off immediately in the next chapters.
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