Torres Wakes After the Supernova and Learns What Her Klingon Half Cost Redbay
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Star Trek: Voyager - Invasion #4: The Final Fury
By Dafydd ab Hugh
ISBN: 0671541811
Two days after the supernova, radiation in the former Fury sector has dropped enough to breathe again. Voyager stays in orbit around the star remnant because Janeway will not leave until B’Elanna Torres wakes up and tells her what happened on that moon.
Twelve more hours pass. B’Elanna sighs. She has made sounds before, but this sigh leads to weak sobbing. First real emotion since beam-in.
Janeway takes her mummy-wrapped hand. Kes touches her brow. The lieutenant mostly shielded her face from the searing heat. The rest of her body will need weeks of repligrafting even with Delta Quadrant medicine.
B’Elanna opens her eyes and screams. The Doctor moves to restrain her. She bites his hand hard enough to sever a thumb if he were flesh. Holographic force field saves his digits and her teeth.
They hold her and talk her down for half an hour before she is coherent enough to debrief. Haltingly she tells of finding the aiming mechanism at the last moment and sabotaging it.
“It’s a damned good thing you thought of that,” Janeway says. “None of the other gremlins you pulled did a thing. The beam still fired, created the wormhole, and the planet still passed through it to anybody’s guess where.”
“I saved us?”
“You saved us, Lieutenant.”
“Are the Furies gone?”
Janeway smiles in that downturned way that mixes warmth and sadness. “They’re gone. Sent into the middle of nowhere. I doubt they’ll find their way back to our galaxy, and definitely not to the Alpha Quadrant. Not ever.”
Kes adds the physical cost. Fished out of an exploding supernova. Badly burned. More than fifteen broken bones. Going to be all right.
“And Redbay?”
Janeway answers before awkward silence grows.
“He didn’t make it, Torres. I’m sorry.”
The Doctor leans close. She survived partly because she is half-Klingon. Redbay was human. His body could not take the strain.
B’Elanna stares at him like he grew a second head. She does not seem pleased. She closes her eyes and tilts her head.
Either she rages because she is an angry young Klingon, or she survives a supernova because she has tough Klingon hide. Cannot she ever just be her?
She knows the answer before she finishes the thought. Part of who she is is bumpy-headed, thick-skinned, warrior-hearted Klingon. She cannot deny it anymore. And it saved her life.
Later, after Janeway leaves and the Doctor moves on, Kes returns. Ocampan eyes meet Klingon face. Kes bites her lip.
“You said you were hit by the Furies’ terror beam. What was it like? That kind of fear. I’ve never even imagined that kind of emotion.”
She needs to know there was a reason every Alpha Quadrant race would rather be slaves than face that weapon. It has to be more than fear of death or pain.
“I don’t remember. Selective amnesia. The doctor said it might happen.”
“But you remember everything else!”
“I don’t remember.”
Cold, defiant Klingon eyes burn into Kes. Kes understands and drops the subject.
The End.
That is literally how the book ends. No victory parade. No epilogue with Starfleet commendations. A burned engineer in sickbay, a dead lieutenant from another ship, and an Ocampan who will never get the answer she needs about the weapon that defined this invasion.
I appreciate the honesty. Torres saved the Alpha Quadrant and lost the man who figured out the L4 aiming trick. Redbay gets no speech. He dies off-page in triage while the Doctor learns to be human.
The Klingon half speech is classic B’Elanna angst, but here it lands because the book earned it. She spent chapters arguing about twenty-seven billion lives. She climbed a kilometer of ladder. She threw a fellow officer into vacuum. Her biology mattered at the end in the most unfair way possible.
Kes asking about the terror beam connects back to the prelude and the whole Invasion crossover. Every other race in the Alpha Quadrant folded before that weapon. Kes, who has barely known fear, wants to understand why. Torres cannot or will not tell her.
Selective amnesia might be real. Might be armor. Either way, the book refuses to describe the indescribable. After thirty chapters of cosmic engineering and ramming speed chicken, the final beat is quiet refusal.
Janeway waiting two days at the star remnant fits her character. She needs the story before she can call the mission over. What Torres and Redbay did on that moon is the only reason the wormhole missed its target.
Redbay did not make it to see it. B’Elanna did. That is the aftermath.
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