Shuttlecraft Outings - Season Six

Equinox: 2

• Maxwell Burke and his little band of mutineers on the Equinox decide that, even with their ship's warp core about to overload, there are still more attractive options available to them than Voyager's brig. They arm themselves to the teeth and try to make their way through unshielded corridors full of irate Ankari spirit beings to the shuttlebay two decks down from the bridge, where they apparently still have a working shuttle. They don't make it. Neither does the shuttle, since Equinox blows up shortly afterwards. Still, at least it isn't a Voyager shuttle...

Barge Of The Dead

• In a coma induced dream, B'Elanna Torres imagines the conclusion of a perilous shuttle ride in which she chased Voyager's one and only multi-spatial probe into the centre of an ion storm. With her deflector field blown and helm control gone, she limps towards the ship, venting plasma from her shuttle's port nacelle. After the ship applies a tractor beam to slow her down, she crash lands in the shuttle bay. The shuttle does however make it back structurally intact, apart from a piece of metal from a Klingon ship which got wedged in that leaking nacelle, and since it's only in B'Elanna's mind the shuttle maintenance crew can take it easy for a change.
• In the real version of B'Elanna's shuttle journey, her ship was picked up by Voyager drifting on the trailing edge of an ion storm, all life support lost. Since B'Elanna was in a coma and unable to assist in its retrieval, Voyager tractored the shuttle back aboard ship.

Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy

• An away team which includes Tom Paris, B'Elanna Torres and Neelix takes a trip in the Delta Flyer to an unnamed planet to pick up some antonium for the ship. Apart from a geological instability within 100 metres of their target location which obliges Tom to set down outside that area and necessitates the away team having to do a little walking on unstable ground, it's a relatively straightforward mission. Much more straightforward, certainly, than the Doctor's fantasy version of it, in which the Flyer gets fired upon by a Borg vessel and crashes in the canyon it's supposed to be landing in. But then the Doctor bears a grudge. He wanted to be on that away mission.

Alice

• Taking a look at Abaddon's ship junkyard, a small derelict ship catches Tom Paris's eye. Harry Kim condemns it as an old rust bucket, but Paris waxes lyrical about the beauty of its lines, and then campaigns hard for Chakotay's permission to purchase it. He says he's in love, and he's certainly enthusiastic enough to contribute his entire interactive record collection to get it. Unfortunately, while its optronic weapons array might be an asset to the ship, the neurogenic interface that allows it to react instantly to the pilot's thoughts turns out rather less well. It would seem that it also allows the pilot to react instantly to the ship's thoughts, and Alice has her own agenda. Gradually taking over Paris's mind, she works him into the ground getting her spaceworthy enough to fly again, coaxes him into theft of vital parts, nearly murders B'Elanna when she gets in her way, and then kidnaps Paris and takes him off to the particle fountain that she calls home. Since Janeway takes exception to having her pilot appropriated, Voyager snatches him back, and the pilotless Alice comes to an explosive end in the particle fountain. However, she's more or less Paris's personal property rather than one of the ship's official shuttles, so she clearly doesn't count.
• Chakotay, resisting Paris's sales pitch for the little ship, says that they already have the Delta Flyer and a full complement of shuttles. This week maybe, Chakotay, but try taking the long term view!
• Neelix gets nostalgic about his own little ship, called Baxial, and apparently still sitting down in the shuttlebay and getting its compulsory two-yearly mention. He recalls that when he first set eyes on it he thought it was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen. But she grew on him. And she very nearly gets an outing, as he proposes to Paris that maybe the two of them should take Baxial and Alice and make it a double date.
• Paris reminisces with Alice about his first ever shuttle flight. When he was eight, his father took him up in an old S-Class shuttle, a small craft with only two seats, no warp drive, and manual helm controls. He says that he was scared out of his wits, and that at first he couldn't keep the ship level. Of course, being the best darned pilot you could have, it didn't take long for him to get the hang of it and get that rush from flying and moment of extreme clarity which he's been chasing ever since, in every ship he's ever flown.
• A chastened Paris promises B'Elanna that, after Alice, he won't embark upon any more affairs with strange ships. B'Elanna promptly questions the nature of his relationship with the Delta Flyer, but he tells her that they're just friends.

Riddles

• Tuvok and Neelix are on an away mission in the Delta Flyer, having visited the Kesat homeworld to negotiate with the latest friendly species through whose territory they are flying. Unfortunately, on the return journey the Flyer undergoes a stealth attack by a somewhat unfriendlier species, the Ba'neth, a cloaked race whom the Kesat believe to be no more than a myth. After Tuvok witnesses their attempt to download the tactical database from the Flyer, he is attacked with an energy weapon which leaves him brain damaged and in a coma. The Flyer itself fares rather better, since Neelix is able to pilot it back to Voyager without any problems.

One Small Step

• Borg shield enhancements are made to the Delta Flyer in order to allow it to punch its way inside the graviton ellipse, with a crew consisting of Chakotay, Tom Paris and Seven of Nine. Because Chakotay tries to take the command module of the Ares IV, missing since October 2032, back with them when they depart their velocity is too slow to allow them to escape the ellipse before it collides with a dark matter asteroid. As a result, the Delta Flyer is caught in the shockwave, and tumbles back into the ellipse. An energy surge hits Chakotay, giving him internal injuries and a concussion, and the shuttle loses communications, shields and propulsion. It really is about time they thought of giving those particular systems emergency backups. Although to be fair, auxiliary life support and the secondary relays have been damaged too. B'Elanna Torres comes up with the idea of salvaging the ion distributor from the Ares IV and jury rigging it to replace the Flyer's plasma manifold so that they can get engines back on line and escape the ellipse. They manage it just in time, with a little last minute help from Voyager's tractor beam.
• Harry Kim suggests modifying a class two shuttle and sending it into the ellipse to rescue the crew of the damaged Delta Flyer. The idea is dismissed by Paris, who reminds them that it took hours longer to do the original modifications on the Flyer than they have available before the ellipse (with the stranded away team) disappears back into subspace.

The Voyager Conspiracy

• Distraught when her latest confused conspiracy theory makes the capture and examination of herself the goal, Seven takes the Delta Flyer without permission and flees the ship. Voyager gives chase as she heads towards the space catapult, targeting the shuttle's propulsion and weapons, but with a complete lack of success since the ever-thorough Seven has put their targeting scanners out of alignment before departing. Since she's also disguised her biosignature, preventing them from beaming her out, Janeway beams aboard the Flyer to try to reason with her. She succeeds. Interestingly enough, they both then beam back to the ship, which suggests that when Seven dropped the forcefield she erected to keep Janeway or anyone else who might drop by for a visit away from her in the pilot's seat, she must have disabled her biosignature scrambling as well. I assume that they tractored the Flyer back in the usual way, since it shows up in subsequent weeks.

Memorial

• An away team consisting of Tom Paris, Chakotay, Neelix and Harry Kim takes the Delta Flyer out for a two week mining survey. The shuttle returns in great shape, apart from the sonic shower, which apparently went offline part way through the mission. However, at least one of its crew is getting just a little bit punchy. Having worked eighteen hour days to scan fifteen planets in fourteen days, and having filled the cargo hold with dilithium without the benefit of that sonic shower, Harry Kim has worked up to a full blown rant about people leaving their dirty dishes in the replicators and is accusing the guilty party of creating a biohazard. Everyone else keeps their cool and pleads innocent. And Neelix ventures his opinion that the away mission was a great bonding experience.

Tsunkatse

• While the crew take shore leave in the Norcadian system, Janeway vacations by taking the Delta Flyer and three non speaking crewmembers to Pendari in the neighbouring system. Since when she's contacted concerning the missing Seven and Tuvok, she's at the outer rim of the Pendari system and estimates it will take a good 48 hours to return to Voyager, it seems likely from the timings that she never actually reached her destination planet before turning around. She arrives back just in time to take a few potshots at the Tsunkatse ship and take out its signal generators.
• Tuvok and Seven of Nine petition Chakotay to be allowed to take a shuttle on a 48 hour pass to study a collapsing micronebula. Everyone else seems aghast that they should want to go on an away mission during shore leave, but in fact they find it more restful and relaxing doing that than in having to work at finding pleasure in the recreational activities that the rest of the crew enjoys. Sadly, their non awkward silence is rudely interrupted by a Tsunkatse slave ship, which emits a dampening field to disable their shuttle's engines, weapons and shields, then beams aboard an explosive device which knocks them out and allows them to be captured and recruited for the games. Although nobody mentions the fate of the shuttle, it's likely that it was in sufficiently good shape for Voyager to detect and retrieve it while they were hunting for its passengers, since its crew survived the explosion relatively undamaged while in deep space.
• Of the Pendari fighter (the one known in a parallel universe as The Rock), Neelix says that he looks like he could pick up a shuttlecraft.

Collective

• Apparently, despite his previous threats, they did manage to get Harry Kim back in a shuttle with Tom Paris, Chakotay and Neelix again. This time there aren't any frayed tempers aboard the Delta Flyer, just a little poker game, which gets interrupted when Paris looks up to see a Borg cube dead ahead... and before we get to discover who's hustling who. Unable to outrun the cube as a result of losing warp drive due to damage to the plasma injectors, they gamely take on the cube by aiming photon torpedoes at its propulsion matrix and knocking it out. Meanwhile, Kim is down in the jefferies tubes trying to clear the plasma injectors, which is handy for him as it means the Borg overlook him when they tractor the shuttle into the cube and apprehend the rest of its crew. Having been knocked unconscious, he comes around to find Voyager paging him, and promptly starts modifying the shuttle's systems in order to allow him to reply on the same carrier wave. The Delta Flyer is parked in a Borg hanger bay; presumably it is retrieved when Voyager takes the surviving neo-natal drones aboard.

Ashes To Ashes

• On stardate 51563, Harry Kim and Lyndsay Ballard were on an away mission in a shuttlecraft to harvest dilithium ore from an M Class planet in the Vyntadi expanse. Landing, they discovered that it was a Hirogen trap, and on their way back to the shuttle Lyndsay was shot and fatally injured by a neural disrupter. Harry took her body back to Voyager, but she died before his shuttle reached the ship. No damage to the shuttle was reported.
• Three years later, Lyndsay Ballard steals a Kobali shuttle in order to flee from her adoptive race back to Voyager. She is pursued for six months before making contact. Her shuttle is shot at more than once, but it's not Federation property, and returns to the Kobali along with her. In the meantime, Tuvok analyses it carefully and comes up with 37 ways of repelling a Kobali attack, based on the intelligence gathered from his scans of its structure and systems.

NOTE: Shuttle outings for Good Shepherd to The Haunting Of Deck Twelve have not yet been tallied. I hope to get around to it as soon as I've finished migrating the Nebula from Geocities.

Unimatrix Zero: 1

• Paris and Torres spend some time in the shuttlebay, prepping the Delta Flyer for launch. Paris, worried about both his girlfriend and his shuttle, cautions Torres to keep an eye on the starboard plasma injectors and their tendency to run a little hot, and the fractionally out of alignment warp matrix. He threatens to abort the mission by sabotaging the helm, only half jokingly.
• Under cover of an assault on the Borg cube by Voyager, a crew of Janeway, Tuvok and Torres sneaks the Delta Flyer in close to it on thrusters only. They manage to get within twenty kilometres before the Borg Queen detects the shuttle. While she's giving the order to fire, they're aligning the frequency of the Flyer's transporters to match that of the ventral shield grid which Voyager managed to damage. They beam off the shuttle and on to the Borg cube just as the cube's fire clips one of the Flyer's delta wings, spinning it slightly before a second and more accurate shot blows it to pieces. Darn. Guess it wasn't invulnerable after all. Farewell, Delta Flyer.