Every god damn reporter, family member and ‘enquiry officer’ has asked me the same first god damn questions to start their interviews. So let’s just get this out of the way. Mrs Torres did you think it was fair that you got to be Chief Engineer on Voyager when you weren’t a member of the Starfleet crew? Mrs Torres what do you think it says about the Maquis that you all ‘fell into line’ so quickly under Janeways command? Mrs Torres do you think that Voyager would have gotten home faster if you and the other Maquis had mutinied?

One. Yes. I do think it was fair. So did Captain Janeway. Voyager needed a Chief Engineer that wasn’t afraid to break the rules and twist some arms to keep the ship going.

Two. The Maquis were angry at the Federation’s handling of the Cardassians and how they gave away people's homes to keep a peace, which judging by events in the alpha quadrant while Voyager was lost, the Cardassians had no intention of maintaining in the long term anyway. I’d say I told you so, but I think the Dominion did that for me.

That was… Insensitive. Sorry.

But that’s why those of us who went to the Delta Quadrant on the Val Jean integrated so quickly with Janeway’s crew. Our fight was with the Federation, not Starfleet specifically and certainly not Janeway. A significant number of us were ex-Starfleet in some shape or form anyway. What would you do when faced with 70 years on a Starfleet ship? Join the crew or sit in a Starfleet room twiddling your thumbs and combing through the cultural database?

I mean you’re preaching to the choir here

Then again, someone like Harren may have preferred that. Unfortunately for him he was already part of the Starfleet crew

He was a pain in the neck. But onto three. Would we have got home faster under Chakotay rather than Janeway? Honestly? It often felt like he was holding her back more than the other way around. Plus, I didn’t see a time travelling Chakotay coming from the future* to point us to the transwarp hub.

I guess I really was preaching to the choir. Engineer by trade I take it?

Alright. Yes. I was aware, but not at first. When we first started off home Janeway asked me to look at ways to improve ships efficiency. One of my first big projects was converting the auxiliary impulse reactor into an admittedly crude dilithium refinery. I don’t often like to blow my horn, but it was surprisingly easy. As was converting cargo bays into airponics bays and later, as Tom described it, ‘Seven’s haunted very public bedroom’.

A couple of years in, we were attacked by the Kazon and they took over Voyager for a brief time. They stranded me and the rest of the crew on a planet called ‘Hanon IV’. Long story short, we got the ship back and when we did I wanted to make sure that we hadn’t been left any nasty surprises. The Kazon had unsurprisingly been accessing a lot of the engineering documentation from the computer core.

They weren’t… The brightest. But I needed to check through it all to make sure nothing had been tampered with or changed in a way that might cause us trouble if a less capable engineer had to take over.

Hey, you have to consider these things on a 70 year voyage!

But it was when I was doing this that I found some of the original design specifications and plans for the Intrepid class buried in a sub-system. When I found those, a lot of the ease we had converting the ship to be able to provide resources for the crew over an extended period began to make sense.

The only difference for us I guess was that our colony also needed to keep being a starship.

*Redacted by the department of Temporal Investigations