Five hours ago Tom Paris had leaned back in his pilot's seat aboard the Federation shuttle Benjamin in absolute boredom. He'd rested the back of his boyishly handsome, blond head against his folded arms, idly alternating between whistling and humming various nameless tunes. He'd practically fought the urge to count the stars that lagged by his viewscreen as the shuttle drifted along its route to rendezvousing with Voyager. What he wouldn't have given for a small space anomoly or asteroid shower or something to break the monotony! Just to have been able to increase the shuttle's speed from sluggish to slightly less sluggish would have been a godsend, as far as the codky young pilot - who'd never been known for his patience - was concerned. Come on, I'm the pilot of Voyager, after all. I've flown through theoretically impossible situations. And now I'm wasting my time on what could possibly be the most theoretically dull away mission known to man,he thought.
Five hours later he thought he was an idiot.
"Mayday! Mayday! Paris to Voyager, do you read? Paris to..." Paris' frantic hails were cut short as another blast of enemy firepower buffeted the shuttlecraft. Benjamin groaned in protest, shaking so hard with the last attack that for a moment Paris feared it would shake its own bulkheads apart in agony.
Smoke filled the cabin; emergency lights and warning signals blinked and clanged everywhere. Every other console was either emitting little charges of electricity or were else totally inoperative and devoid of all power. The shuttle was a barely held together wreck...that wouldn't hold much longer. And there, on the viewscreen, zipping across his field of vision were the shuttle's two attackers desperately trying to make her come apart.
"Not if I can help it," Tom muttered defiantly at the ugly little alien vessels outside. He put all of his rather impressive piloting skills into either avoiding the aliens' shots or taking them in areas where they would cause the least amount of damage. The problem was that those areas were becoming smaller and less in number as each of the shuttle's systems began to break down. And as the shuttle took more hits it became increasingly slow to command...soon he wouldn't be able to maneuver the vessel at all and then...he'd be a sitting duck.
'Just find me some feathers and teach me to "quack", he thought. He was already a sitting duck and he knew it. They had him - there was just no way he'd make it through the anomalous cloud separating him from Voyager in time to escape his attackers. Not if the ship didn't get one of his distress signals in time to come to his aide - and as he had yet to get any sort of response from that direction he considered that possibility to be highly unlikely. Hell, he didn't even know if they could receive a transmission from him through the cloud barrier, yet he continued to transmit at odd intervals anyhow. Those intervals grew increasingly closer together as the shuttle's condition worsened and the cloud barrier neared...and yet felt further and further away. 'I didn't think I'd hear myself thinking this, but 'boring' sure does sound a hell of a lot better right now.'
Tom almost laughed when he thought that he, Tom Paris, Starfleet pilot, ex-Maquis mercenary, ex-convict from prisons and 'rehabilitation centers' in probably thirteen different sectors in two different quadrants of space, would very likely meet his end right here, in a crippled little shuttle being fired upon by huge...garbage scowls.
That's what the little ships resembled to him: large, ugly, rust-colored garbage scowls from old Earth. Not at all what he'd imagined when Neelix was briefing him and the crew on his mission. The way the excited little Talaxian had spoken of the Minkani Tom had pictured huge, menacing ships flittering all over the sector of space enclosed in the rings of anomalous space clouds he was heading for now. They were supposed to be aggressive and dangerous and of immense numbers, but not too keen at spotting small, fast ships. That's why they'd opted for taking a shuttle through the clouds to search for supplies rather than just bringing Voyager through herself. They probably wouldn't have entered into the whole mess at all...if rations weren't getting so low and the next nearest planetoid wasn't so impossibly distant. As it was, however, they'd decided to risk it. tom was the best pilot in the Delta Quadrant, after all, and it was just supposed to be a quick drop-in-and-have-a-look-see-then-get-out type of mission. What could go wrong? Plenty. Topm had learned that more often than not in his life. But then again, noone had actually been through this sector of space for as long as Neelix could remember so they had no idea just how accurate his reports on the situation were.
When Tom first entered the space, he was sure Neelix had been mistaken. There wasn't a ship in sight; the entire area was quiet and as empty as a Kazon's head. He'd gone all the way to a nearby planetoid, gotten the necessary scans to prove that it was, indeed, rich in energy and food supplies, and had started heading back before he'd even caught sight of a single ship. And when he did he wasn't very impressed. The little vessel was small, dark, and ugly as all get out. Tom found himself frowning in disgust just at having seen the damned thing. He'd thought to himself that he'd hate to see the repugnant little ship try to move any faster than a slow drift or it'd probably plow nose first into the nearest cluster of space debris. It looked horribly inefficient. Of course, looks could be deceiving, as Tom knew all too well now as he ried to keep his battered shuttle one step ahead of destruction. Those little garbage scowls looked harmless, but Neelix hadn't overestimated their lethality. Rather, he had underestimated them. Even travelling at low impulse to avoid detection ( a simple trick Neelix said should have been enough, considering the dampening effects of the anomolous cloud's presence on sensors) the ship had picked up on Tom's shuttle in no time and suddenly had a friend swooping in to join in on the fun as well. The way they were diving around him, taking pot shots, it looked as if they were toying with the shuttle, just seeing how many shots it would take to do the deermined little vessel in. The notion infuriated Tom - that theses nasty little hunks of scrap heap would get their kicks out of picking on his sleek little shuttle. As another stream of chirps and whistles came from the console before him, Tom realized his tormentors didn't have many more kicks to get out of the poor Benjamin. The damage reports were worsening, and his mouth formed a grim line when he realized that life support systems were down another 17%. The shuttle rocked with yet another volley of hits, and Tom stared down at the steadily dropping life support readings. If those readings kept dropping faster than the Benjamin kept coming apart, at least his pride would be spared.
He wouldn't live to see the Minkani tear his ship apart.