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English
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Published:
2024-04-14
Words:
287
Chapters:
1/1
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3
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2
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17

Cetacean Opt-Out

Summary:

In the midst of yet another WTF day on the USS Tesseract, Maren realizes THE DOLPHINS WERE RIGHT.

Work Text:

Sitting in a Jeffries Tube back-to-back with Maren O’Connor as phaser fire seared through the air around them, John Quigley was expecting to hear a lot of things out of her mouth … “This is how we fix this” being chief among them.

 

What he did NOT expect to hear was what she actually said: “The dolphins were right.”

 

“EXCUSE me?” John shouted as he fired a shot at their attackers.  The front assailant – a Delta Quadrant native of a species not yet cataloged – went down hard with a pained screech. Behind him, he felt Maren adjust her position and brace herself against him as she fired down the tube … no doubt a fresh front on their little war, as the invaders closed in hungrily on their position.

 

“The dolphins,” Maren said, firing off another shot.  “Cetacean Ops.  The original designs for the Tesseract had two whole decks devoted to them, but they flat out refused to come.”

 

“I didn’t know that,” John shot back, as he leaned back HARD to dodge a phaser blast and push Maren out of the line of fire.

 

“Yeah,” she said, a bit breathlessly, as she realized how close she’d come to being hit.  “They said that they looked over the DQ data Voyager brought back and saw no evidence that there was any aquatic life represented out there, and that they felt it would be a poor use of resources for them to go where they could not safely explore, and that they were afraid the risks to their safety if they were discovered by the Borg weren’t worth the risk.”

A phaser blast narrowly missed her face and she flinched, then scowled.

“They were right.  The dolphins were fucking right.”