In the Navy they called it the midwatch. On Voyager it was gamma shift. Either way, Tobias Ferrante had decided long ago, it was the same thing: the hours when a ship belonged to the people nobody remembered.

He liked it. Main Engineering at 0300 was dim and quiet, the warp core throbbing blue and slow like something asleep, four people on duty where there were twenty in the daytime. Nobody shouting. Nobody running. He could do his rounds and check his readings and drink bad replicator tea and not have to talk to anybody, which suited him, because he had been Maquis, and even after four years on this ship there were still Starfleet people who looked at him like he might steal the silverware.

At 0312 the board in front of him chirped.

He looked at it and frowned. Coolant pressure variance, port nacelle, secondary loop, junction 9-Delta. It wasn't much. A flutter, three percent up and three percent down, like a pulse that couldn't make up its mind. He ran a diagnostic. The diagnostic said the junction was fine. The pressure fluttered again.

It would be nothing. It was almost always nothing. But junction 9-Delta was in the middle of a Jefferies tube, eighty meters of crawlspace about as wide as a coffin, and the thought of it made his palms go wet.

He logged it for day shift. He did not go look.

At 0331 the pressure dropped eight percent, and the board stopped chirping and started to whoop.

*

Lieutenant Torres came out of the turbolift at 0334 in a pair of gray sweats and a Starfleet jacket thrown on over them, her hair every which way, looking like a woman who had been asleep for exactly forty minutes after a sixteen-hour day and wanted everyone to know it.

"Report," she said.

He told her. She looked at the board for about four seconds.

"That's not the junction," she said. "That's the regulator valve upstream of it. The sensor's reading the valve hunting back and forth and blaming the junction. It's been doing it for a month. I've been meaning to replace the thing." She grabbed a tool kit off the rack and tossed him another. "Come on."

"Lieutenant, I could stay and monitor the—"

"Nessa can monitor. It's a two-person job. You hold the light, I swear at the valve." She was already walking. "Move, Ferrante."

He moved.

*

The tube was exactly as bad as he remembered.

It was the ceiling, mostly. You could crawl, but you couldn't kneel up; if you tried, you hit your head on a conduit. The light was yellow and flat. The air tasted like metal. Every eight meters there was a junction, where the tube crossed another tube, and a little ladder went up or down into more of the same, and all of it went on and on through the body of the ship like the tunnels of an ant farm. He kept his eyes on the soles of Torres's boots and counted junctions and breathed through his nose.

At junction six, she stopped.

"You're breathing like you just ran the length of the ship," she said, without turning around.

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're gray. I can see it from here." Now she did turn, awkwardly, twisting to look at him over her shoulder in the narrow space. "How long have you been like this in the tubes?"

He thought about lying. He was too tired to lie. "Since the Cardassians took the colony. There was a cargo hold. We were in it for two days before the evacuation ships came." He swallowed. "It was about this big."

She was quiet for a moment. He waited for the lecture: about reporting medical conditions, about duty rosters, about the Doctor. It didn't come.

"You should've told me," she said at last. Not angry. Just a fact.

"You'd have taken me off tube rotation."

"Maybe."

"I don't want to be the guy who's off tube rotation. I was Maquis. I already have to be twice as good as anybody who came over from the Academy side, or they look at me like—" He stopped.

"Like you might steal the silverware," said Torres.

He stared at her.

She turned back around and started crawling again. "I washed out of the Academy," she said to the tube ahead of her. "You know that? Everybody knows that. I had a temper and a chip on my shoulder the size of a shuttlecraft, and I was half Klingon on a campus full of people who'd never met one. I figured I'd quit before they could throw me out." A clank as she moved her kit ahead. "When I came on board, I thought every single Starfleet officer on this ship was waiting for me to blow up. Half of them probably were. I spent a year trying to be twice as good."

"What happened?"

"I got tired." She reached junction nine and stopped. "Turns out twice as good is exhausting. Plain good is plenty. Hand me the light."

*

The regulator valve was behind an access panel at the junction, a stubby gray cylinder the size of a thermos with a readout that flickered like it was nervous. Torres lay on her back under it with her head in the crossway and her hands up inside the housing, and Ferrante lay on his stomach beside her and held the light, and she did, as promised, swear at the valve. She did it in English and then in something that was probably Klingon, and she did it steadily and without any real heat, the way some people hum.

He found that it helped. He found that if he watched her hands, and not the ceiling, and listened to her swearing, and not his own heart, the tube got a little bigger.

"Pull the spare out of my kit," she said. "Blue case. Careful, the seals are fussy."

He did it. She changed the valve in eleven minutes flat. He timed it, just to have something to count.

"Torres to Nessa."

"Go ahead, Lieutenant."

"How's the pressure?"

"Steady as a rock. Variance is gone."

"Good." She let her hands drop onto her chest and lay there for a second with her eyes closed. Then, without opening them, she said, "Ferrante. You did fine."

"I held a flashlight."

"You held a flashlight in a tube for forty minutes, eighty meters in, and you didn't bolt. I've seen people with no reason at all to be scared of these things who couldn't do that." She opened her eyes. "I'm going to put you on tube rotation once a week. Short runs. Near the hatches. We'll work up to it. And you're going to tell the Doctor, because he'll want to know, and because he'll be unbearable if he finds out I knew and you didn't tell him."

He opened his mouth to argue. Then he shut it.

"Yes, Lieutenant."

*

When they came back down the ladder into Engineering it was 0420, and there was somebody standing by the warp core who had not been there before, holding two mugs.

Ferrante almost dropped his kit. He had been on this ship four years, and he had spoken to the captain exactly twice, once in the mess hall and once to say yes, Captain in a crowded corridor. She was in uniform, but her hair was down, and she looked, he thought, like somebody who'd given up on sleeping hours ago.

"I heard the alert," Captain Janeway said. "I was up anyway. Everything all right, B'Elanna?"

"Regulator valve. It's fixed. Crewman Ferrante found it."

He had not found it, and Torres knew he had not found it, and he looked at her, and she looked back at him with no expression at all.

The captain held out one of the mugs. Not to Torres. To him.

"I made too much," she said. "I always make too much at this hour. It's a character flaw." She waited while he took it. It was coffee, black and very strong, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted on Voyager. "Ferrante. You were in Chakotay's cell?"

"No, ma'am. I came aboard with his crew, but I was with another group before that. Out near the border."

She nodded slowly, like she was filing it away somewhere she'd be able to find it. "Well," she said. "You're in my crew now. Thank you for keeping her running." And she handed the other mug to Torres, and the two of them walked off toward the chief engineer's office, talking in low voices about the regulator valves in the starboard nacelle, and Tobias Ferrante stood alone by the warp core at 0425 with a cup of the captain's coffee going warm in his hands.

Four people on duty. The core throbbing, blue and slow. The hours when a ship belonged to the people nobody remembered.

Somebody had remembered.

He finished the coffee. Then he went to the duty roster and, before he could think too much about it, put his own name down for the tubes on Tuesday.

~ END ~

Author's note: We had a guy like Ferrante on my boat. Best sonar operator I ever served with, and he couldn't stand the forward escape trunk. Nobody ever made him say why. This one's for him.