B'Elanna Torres

B'Elanna Torres is a female half-Klingon, half-Human Starfleet officer in the 24th century.

Childhood
B'Elanna Torres was born in 2349 to John Torres, a Human, and Miral, a Klingon, on the Federation colony Kessik IV, where she spent much of her early life. Because hostilities existed between the Klingon Empire and the Federation at that time, Torres and her mother were the only Klingons on Kessik IV. Although none of the other colonists voiced any negative opinions of Torres, she perceived that she and her mother were different, a feeling that she did not enjoy. While Torres was still young and living on Qo'noS, her mother took her to visit the Sea of Gatan, where she almost drowned. After her mother resuscitated her, she told Torres about the Klingon beliefs of the afterlife, Sto-vo-kor, and Gre'thor. In 2354, when Torres was five years old, her father left the Kessik IV and traveled back to Earth, never to return again. Torres and her mother, Miral, found it hard to cope. After her parents' marriage ended, her mother pulled Torres out of the Federation school she was attending and took her to a Klingon monastery in order to teach her honor and discipline.

Starfleet Academy Life
Beginning in 2366, Torres attended Starfleet Academy where she participated on the Academy decathlon team. During her time in the Academy, she had four disciplinary hearings and one suspension. She also had to dodge several punches in the lab. Torres also dated fellow Cadet Maxwell Burke during those times, however, their relationship did not last long. After a brilliant but troubled two years leading toward an engineering specialty, she dropped out of the Academy at age 19. Her teachers included Commander Zakarian and Professor Chapman. Torres and Chapman argued constantly, so she was later surprised to learn that Chapman thought she was one of the finest students he had ever taught and was disappointed when she dropped out. He had placed a note in her permanent record saying he would support her if she ever reapplied.

The Maquis
Two years after leaving the Acadamy, an angry young Torres eventually joined the Maquis in 2370, after former Starfleet officer Chakotay saved her life. From then on she formed a close friendship with Chakotay and she became one of his most trusted friends. At that point in her life, the Maquis became the closest thing to family she had ever had. Fighting Cardassians gave her the outlet she needed in dealing with her violent emotions.

To help deal with her explosive and often violent temper, Chakotay taught her many Native American and spiritual techniques to help calm her emotions, he even trained her to speak to her "animal guide".

The first time Torres took a leadership role in the Maquis, she led her people into a cave that she thought was a Cardassian military installation, but she mistook unstable mineral deposits for weapons signatures. There was a rock slide and she and her team were stuck there for three days. They finally dug themselves out with their bare hands before being rescued.

The Delta Quadrant
In 2371, when Torres' ship was being chased into the Badlands by Cardassians, their ship was mysteriously transported to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker-entity. The newly commissioned Intrepid-class USS Voyager under the command of Captain Kathryn Janeway soon went in search for them and were likewise transported to that part of the galaxy.

After being subjected to a painful examination by the Caretaker, the crews of Voyager and the Maquis vessel were returned to their ships, with the exception of Torres and Ensign Harry Kim. Those two were sent by the Caretaker to an Ocampa settlement beneath the surface of a planet, where they were told that they were dying and needed medical care. Torres refused to cooperate and attempted to escape. Both Torres and Kim were rescued by the crews of Voyagerand the Maquis. The Maquis ship was later destroyed, and its crew, including Torres, joined the USS Voyager.

Chief Engineer, USS Voyager
Since the two crews were stranded together in the Delta Quadrant, they were forced to work together as a single crew. Torres was initially assigned the provisional rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade. Torres had difficulty getting along with the temporary Chief Engineer, Joe Carey. She was later recommended as a replacement Chief Engineer by the new First Officer of Voyager, Chakotay. However, Kathryn Janeway opposed this decision. After Voyager became trapped in a quantum singularity, Torres proved her skills to Janeway and earned her respect. Janeway then gave Torres the provisional rank of full Lieutenant (giving her rank parity with Carey) and made her Chief Engineer over Carey.

The First Year
While exploring a nebula, Torres discovered that it was actually a living creature and that by entering the cloud-like being, Voyager had wounded it. Torres and Janeway, using a shuttle, were able to heal the wounded creature. Each gained a new respect for the other.

Later that same year, Torres was captured by Vidiians, who experimented on her. A Vidiian named Sulan, who had learned that Klingon DNA was resistant to the Phage, separated Torres's Klingon DNA from her. This left Torres fully human, while creating another Torres that was pure Klingon. The Klingon Torres gave her life to save the Human Torres and, once aboard Voyager, the Doctor was able to use the remains to recombine the Klingon elements back into Torres's DNA.

While visiting the Sikarians, she learned that they possessed the ability to fold space and travel great distances. This would have greatly reduced the length of Voyager's journey, but the aliens refused to share their technology because of their own Prime Directive. She wanted to steal the technology or make an illegal trade for it, but Janeway ordered her not to do so. She ignored Janeway's order and arranged a meeting with one of the aliens. She was shocked when Tuvok assisted her, but the technology was not compatible with Voyager.

2372
The following year she was imprisoned by the Mokra Order while trying to secure tellerium, and was later rescued by Janeway. She was also kidnapped by automated personnel units created by an extinct race to fight their wars. The units wanted Torres to help create new units. They had been unable to stabilize their power units. Torres was able to create a prototype from which they could create more units. She found out that their former creators had called off the war, but the units refused to stop and killed their creators. As different units arrived from the other side of the war, a battle ensued. The new prototype that Torres had created would have allowed the Pralor robots to win their war against the Cravic robots. Torres destroyed the prototype, and was beamed aboard Voyager, while the units continued their war.

Later, Voyager encountered an automated missile that had been reprogrammed by Torres while she was still in the Maquis. They found that it had been brought into the Delta Quadrant and was heading toward an inhabited planet. Torres was able to beam aboard it and, with some difficulty, deactivate it.

At first she refused to let The Doctor harvest some of her brain tissue to find a cure for the Phage when Denara Pel, a Vidiian scientist for whom The Doctor had romantic feelings, was beamed aboard Voyager (Klingon DNA is resistant to the Phage). She later consented and it helped The Doctor retard the Phage in Pel.

Torres and Kim had their consciousnesses captured in a Kohl hibernation status control by an evil entity known as The Clown. She was released to inform Janeway that if they tried to disable the program the Clown would kill the Kohl and Kim. She was stranded on a hostile planet when the Kazon took over Voyager. She helped rescue Neelix and Kes from a primitive tribe on the planet.

2373
While Voyager was transporting a group of Enarans, Torres began having dreams of genocide against members of their race known as "the regressives". In her dreams, Torres was reliving the experiences of an Enaran named Jora Mirell. The real Mirell was transmitting her memories to Torres. After Mirell died, Torres confronted the Enarans who denied any knowledge of the event; they left, but not before Torres was able to transfer the memories to another Enaran.

In another encounter, Torres and Tom Paris were attacked by unknown aliens. She was able to recover and get Paris back to Voyager for medical care.

Later that year, Torres was affected by the pon farr when Vorik, a Vulcan crewmate, tried to mate with her. This spurred her Klingon mating instincts which caused many problems. This also led to the first obvious hints of a relationship with Tom Paris. While under the influence of the pon farr, Torres and Paris shared a passionate kiss and intimate revelations about their feelings toward each other. But after fighting with Vorik in the ritual challenge which purged her of the fever, she only vaguely acknowledged what happened.

Torres reprogrammed the Doctor's perfect holo-family into a more realistic example of family life, which caused him distress but ultimately gave him a better understanding of family life and its problems. She helped end the crew's imprisonment by the Nyrians when the crew was imprisoned on a bio-sphere ship. Torres reconfigured The Doctor's optical sensors so that he could detect passages that led to different biospheres. This enabled them to access a translocation system that allowed the crew to escape.

She also took part in a holoprogram about a mutiny on Voyager that Tuvok had programed as a training exercise for his security detail. The program turned deadly after being tampered with by Seska when she had been on the ship two years earlier.

The Borg
During Voyager's first contact with the Borg, she helped to engineer nanoprobes that were used as weapons against Species 8472, who had become a threat not only to Voyager, but to the Borg as well. When Seven of Nine, on board Voyager, attempted to assimilate the vessel after the Species 8472 threat had been eliminated, Torres created a power surge through Seven that disabled her. This severed Seven's link to the Borg Collective.

She took part in the attempt to steal a Borg transwarp coil that would shorten Voyager's journey home. When Seven had been lured back to the collective in the heist, Torres manned the weapons systems allowing the Delta Flyer to rescue Seven.

During the last year of Voyager's trip home, Torres helped to bring a crippling blow to the Borg. She, along with Janeway, and Tuvok, allowed themselves to be assimilated by the Borg. But the assimilation was only of her body. She utilized an inoculation administered by the Doctor before the mission that kept her mind from being assimilated, and thus kept her from becoming a Borg drone. She implanted a pathogen into the collective which slowly brought various Borg drones out of the collective consciousness. This led to a Borg civil war.

2374
Torres had difficulty controlling her anger. She verbally attacked Seven finding it hard to believe she had no 'sense of guilt' for her past as a Borg. While trying to modify the warp core it became critical and had to be dumped. Paris and Torres left in a shuttle to retrieve it. Upon finding it they discovered a Caatati trying to salvage it and after a brief fight the shuttle was destroyed with the two left in space in their spacesuits. As their air dwindled, Torres was forced to confront her true feelings and told Paris she loved him, just as Voyager, which retrieved the core from the Caatati, arrived to rescue them. She accompanied The Doctor on an away mission to save a another sentient hologram stranded on a disabled ship. Torres discovered that the hologram had killed the organics on the ship, and had gone mad. She was able to deactivate him before he killed her. Torres was used as a pawn in an illegal trade of violent thoughts on the planet Mari. She was imprisoned for transferring violent thought to the citizens, but Tuvok proved her innocence.

During the Hirogen takeover of Voyager, when they used the crew in various hunting scenarios, she was a pregnant resistance fighter carrying the baby of one of the German Officers who had taken advantage of her.

An alien switched bodies with Paris and claimed his life aboard Voyager. For a time he even fooled Torres. After examining a substance she had discovered on a toxic planet, Torres found that the substance was sentient and could duplicate life forms. She was one of the crew who allowed her DNA to be duplicated by the aliens so that they could experience consciousness.

In late 2374, after Voyager's encounter with Arturis, B'Elanna and Seven of Nine crash-landed on the planet Monorha. In order to keep B'Elanna alive after sustaining injuries in the crash, Seven was forced to assimilate her -- and soon the two women formed a mini-Collective.

Alien race encounters
In 2375, Torres was attacked by a cytoplasmic lifeform that attached itself to her and used her organs to stay alive. The Doctor saved her using a hologram of a Cardassian doctor named Crell Moset. Torres refused to allow Moset to operate on her because he was Cardassian (albeit a holographic one). Moset was in fact a war criminal who had experimented on Bajoran prisoners. When Torres' condition became critical, Captain Janeway decided to let Moset operate on her, despite Torres' wishes.

The previous year she had allowed her DNA to be duplicated by the bio-mimetic beings on the Demon planet. In 2375 her counterpart married the Paris duplicate, and later died from subspace radiation with the rest of the duplicated crew.

Torres encountered the Malon again when she was part of an away team that entered a Malon vessel to shut it down before it exploded and contaminated space with theta radiation. She discovered that the rupture was made by a Malon named Dremk who wished to show the danger of transporting theta radiation. When he refused to let her seal the ruptured tanks, he attacked her and she killed him to save herself and Voyager.

The next year she met up with an old flame from Starfleet Academy, Maxwell Burke, who was stranded in the Delta Quadrant on the USS Equinox. The two ships came in conflict when it was discovered that the Equinox was killing sentient creatures for an energy source.

Personal issues
In 2375, Voyager using a Hirogen communication system, made contact with Starfleet. Torres became extremely depressed when she learned that most of her Maquis friends had been killed by the Dominion. She began taking unnecessary risks, such as using the holodeck with its safety protocols turned off. Along with Paris, Halliwell and Kim, she launched a new shuttle called the Delta Flyer in which they encountered the Malon species. During a battle with them, she devised a way to contain a gas leak and save the crew and the shuttle. This made Torres feel needed again, and her depression subsided.

Klingon issues
Torres was in an accident and when in a coma she found herself in Klingon Hell, Gre'thor. There she met her mother, Miral, who told her that Torres' rejection of Klingon ways had doomed them both. When Torres woke up, she asked to be put into a coma again so she could save her mother. The doctor did as she asked. Her mother was saved not by Torres dying for her or by performing Klingon rituals, but rather by Torres living a good life and being true to herself.

She again confronted her Klingon side when she became pregnant. She was afraid to have a baby because she thought that the baby would suffer as she had during her childhood. She found out that the child had a deformed spine that the doctor could correct genetically in the womb. When she saw a projection of the child and discovered it had Klingon ridges, she questioned whether she wanted the child. She asked the doctor to make further genetic changes so that the child would not have Klingon features. She falsely altered a diagnostic test that convinced the doctor that the changes were necessary.

Paris found out about the false report and stopped the doctor from performing the procedure. He discovered that she blamed herself for her father having left her because she was Klingon. Paris convinced her that he would never do that and wanted a child just like her. She believed him and accepted the pregnancy.

Voyager encountered a Klingon generational ship. They were on a quest to find the savior of the Klingon race, the kuvah'magh. The captain of the Klingon ship, Kohlar, believed her child to be the kuvah'magh. They initiated the self-destruct sequence which in turn caused a warp core breach and Janeway transported their entire crew on board to save them. Kohlar wanted B'Elanna to help him convince his crew that her child really was their savior. When she was insulted by a Klingon warrior, Tom accepted a challenge from him to defend her honor. The warrior collapsed in the battle and the Doctor discovered the Nehret, a fatal disease, caused the collapse. Because the Nehret is only contagious to Klingons, she and the baby became infected. Because of this Kohlar's group no longer believed the child could be their savior and they tried to take over Voyager, but failed. The Doctor discovered a cure to the Nehret using the baby's immune system. The Klingons finally came to believe that the baby was their savior and Janeway dropped them off on an uninhabited M-Class planet. Torres and Paris considered the name Kuvah'Magh for their baby.

2376
Torres battled an alien space craft with a bio-neural interface in order to save Paris. "Alice" attempted to kill Torres by sealing a hatch in the shuttle and shutting off life support systems. Paris saved her.

She fought the Vaadwaur, who, after reviving from stasis, tried to capture Voyager. Torres crashed on a planet where, in exchange for parts to repair the shuttle, she told Kelis, a poet, stories he later used to amuse the head of his planet.

2377
Icheb became infatuated with Torres after he thought she was giving him signals that she was interested in him. She wed Paris after an interstellar starship race that Irina, one of the participants, tried to sabotage and thereby destroy the peace in the area. She had joined Paris in the race because she wished to share his interests. A bomb was planted on their ship, but they were able to eject it in time. They married after the race.

After holograms used by the Hirogen became self-aware, they rebelled and killed many Hirogen. The holograms were led by Iden, who believed that all organics should be destroyed. After their holoprograms became unstable during a battle with the Hirogen and Voyager, Torres, an expert on holo-emitters, was kidnapped. At first believing that they only wanted to be left alone, Torres helped enhance their technology. Once she realized that Iden was bent on destroying organics, she stopped him with the aid of the Doctor. Torres asked Janeway to let the other holograms go and Janeway agreed.

Torres built a polaron modulator that helped Voyager escape a void in space that trapped ships. During the final battle with the Borg which led to Voyager's return home, Torres gave birth to her daughter, Miral Paris, named for B'Elanna's mother.

Tom Paris
Torres had her first romantic flirtation in 2373 during an away mission on a shuttlecraft. Tom Paris asked her out on a date in the holodeck once he found out that she was not interested in the attentions of Ensign Freddy Bristow. Torres, aware of Paris' reputation as a ladies' man, turned him down flat.

In 2377, Torres eventually married Tom Paris. She initially thought he proposed because the Delta Flyer II was about to blow up, but he replied that he was "still alive and still asking." Soon thereafter, they had their first child, Miral, as they arrived in the Alpha Quadrant in 2377.

Life After Voyager
Upon return to the Alpha Quadrant, Torres was promoted to Lieutenant Commander. Torres served on the Galaxy class starship USS Intrepid and the USS Intrepid-A after coming back to the Alpha Quadrant. She then went to the planet Boreth to find her mother, Miral. She eventually found her, and the two began rapprochement, when Miral was mortally wounded by a wild animal. This animal was the mother of a younger animal B'Elanna had hunted for food. The mother had stalked B'Elanna for some time until it eventually attacked the two women. After killing the animal, Miral then asked her daughter to perform the hegh'bat. Knowing that the only other outcome was her mother suffering a slow, painful death, a heartbroken B'Elanna carried out her wishes. After reuniting with her husband and daughter, the family moved to Boreth to pursue prophecies about the infant.

At last report, B'Elanna had made what she considered a significant discovery in the scrolls and received a warning of a threat against Miral's life. Miral was eventually kidnapped by a Klingon religious group that considered her to be the eventual savior of the Klingon people and believed that only they could protect her until it was time to fulfill her destiny. B'Elanna convinced this group that she could protect her daughter, but Miral was still at risk from another Klingon group that wanted her dead. To escape them, Torres and Paris developed a plan where the two would pretend to separate and B'Elanna and Miral would fake their deaths. As a result, in 2381, Torres and Miral Paris' names were appended to a casualty list sent to Starfleet Command in Sector 22093 of those confirmed dead as a result of the Borg attacks in the Alpha Quadrant.

In reality B'Elanna and Miral journeyed into the Delta Quadrant where they rendezvoused with the Project Full Circle fleet. Shortly after new fleet commander, Afsarah Eden, offered B'Elanna a chance to return to active duty, creating for her a the position of Fleet Chief Engineer, which she accepted.

When helping various refugee children from the former Borg Cooperative, Miral spent some time playing with the other children, later giving them her old toys as she wanted them to have toys that had already known love, rather than simply replicating new ones. As one of his last acts, Q arranged for the deaths of the religious group who had driven them away, wanting to spare Miral the burden of being her people's messiah after experiencing it himself. It was subsequently revealed that B'Elanna was pregnant again.

In 2384 Torres served on the USS Intrepid-A after coming back to the Alpha Quadrant after the mission in the Delta Quadrant.