Chapter Text
Federation Oral History Project
USS Voyager Veteran Interview #8
Renlay Sharr, Captain, (ret)
Stardate 90680.93
Terran Standard Date: 6 April 2417
Interviewer: Alright, we're recording now. Can you begin by introducing yourself and explaining your role on Voyager?
Sharr: I'm Captain Renlay Sharr and I served on Voyager as an ensign. My primary duties were conn officer and shuttlecraft pilot.
Interviewer: Thank you. We'll start at the beginning. What was your first week in the Delta Quadrant like?
Sharr: It was scary at first. It was really scary. Later, a lot of bad things happened, we got in a lot of fights and so forth, but we knew each other better then. Right at the beginning, I was 23 years old, it was my second assignment. And I vaguely recognized a couple of the other ensigns from the Academy, but I didn't know them to speak to. So basically I was on a ship in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of strangers and a third, a quarter of them were wanted criminals. When you're in Starfleet, you learn in training, 'OK, when you get out to the Fleet, you know, you can trust your shipmates with your life." But that broke down for me a little in the Delta Quadrant. We all got that trust back later. But at first it was hard. Yeah.
Interviewer: Did you have a difficult time getting along with your Maquis crewmates?
Sharr: You know, when people hear that I was on Voyager, they always ask me that. People are obsessed with the Maquis! [laughter] And did I agree with Captain Janeway's decision to blow up the array, they ask that a lot, too. But no, I never had a problem with the Maquis. I know I sound like I'm contradicting myself, with what I just said about having to learn to trust my shipmates. But we all did learn to trust, really fast, faster than you might think. And that's hard for people to understand. Look, here's how I like to explain it. A lot of people end up staying close friends with people that they roomed with in the Academy, in crew training, in college, whatever. Because, well, maybe you don't have much in common, right? But you're together day in and day out and going through the toughest challenges you've ever faced. That tends to smooth things out, to help you overlook your, your differences. It doesn't matter what your political views are if I need you to help me fix a ruptured EPS conduit before the helm console explodes. That kind of thing. You learn to focus on the good in people. And we were together for seven years with very little outside contact. Not like the Academy where you go home for break and where you have a big city full of other people to socialize with. No, we learned quickly how to get along, Starfleet, Maquis. And we became a family. We still are a family, the ones that are left, and our kids and grandkids, too.
Interviewer: Now I'll ask you that other question: Did you agree with Captain Janeway's decision to destroy the Caretaker's Array?
Sharr: [indistinct] I should have seen that question coming! Oh! Well, honestly it wasn't something I spent a lot of time worrying about. I didn't intend to drive myself crazy, stressing out over things I couldn't control. And we were all so busy, anyway. We were fighting the Kazon and we were all getting shuffled around to different jobs and trying to get cross trained. I wanted to be extra busy all the time at first, anyway, so I wouldn't have time to feel homesick. And then after that, I thought about it. Sure. But it wasn't like here, when people are studying Voyager from the safety of the Alpha Quadrant, they go on and on about [mocking voice] "Was it or was it not a violation of the Prime Directive? Blah blah blah. Why didn't she just use a time bomb? Blah blah blaaaaaah!" We didn't think of it that way. For us, it was like. Have you ever been in a situation where every single thing in your life, pretty much, changes completely in the course of one day? One day. And then nothing is the same. It was like that for us. We were just trying to live our new normal. I hate that phrase. But that's what we were doing. And sometimes I'd say to myself, "I can't believe my life's turned out this way" and I'd think back to the beginning and about what if the Captain had had more options available to her. But she didn't. So mostly I just tried to get on with my life.
Interviewer: Can you tell us about how your new life on Voyager was different from life on other Federation Starships?
Sharr: What, aside from being isolated 70,000 light years from home? You mean slice of life kind of stuff?
Interviewer: Yes, exactly.
Sharr: Well, we worked way harder than on other ships. I didn't fully realize it at the time, my only other assignment had been a planetside posting. I was shocked when I got out to the AQ Fleet! They had it so easy! We did a lot of cross training on Voyager. We were originally sent out to capture a ship full of Maquis and bring them back under guard so we were heavy on security personnel. And then of course our entire medical team was KIA. You know, or maybe you don't know, that Starfleet requires forty percent of a starship's crew to be cross trained, either in emergency medicine, basic engineering, or security. Yeah, it's in the regs, you can look it up. Anyway, on Voyager, we got that figure up to one hundred percent. One hundred percent, can you believe it? Although to hear Tom Paris talk, he was the only person who ever pulled an extra shift in Sickbay. [laughter] I was cross trained in engineering. Simple stuff, gel pack maintenance, repairing EPS conduits, stuff like that. Those EPS conduits. We had more trouble with those. It was a mess. Sparks flying everywhere any time the ship took a hit. Anyway, having other people to do routine work freed up the engineering staff. They certainly had enough to do. They had a team down there building replacement parts out of whatever we could find, they even built three or four shuttles from the ground up. Joe Carey was in command of that team, may he rest in peace. We worked hard, it was intense, but we played hard, too. The holodecks were like, I don't even know how to explain to you how important they were to us. If there was any power available at all, you better believe those holodecks would be up and running. We weren't slackers, you understand, but we needed that, that escape. [indistinct] under pressure. The senior officers knew they had to provide us with a healthy outlet. So we had our own holodeck time and then we had special programs we would share. Most of those shared ones involved a bar. We could drink in there and still be clearheaded to go back on duty. We drank a lot! We played a lot of games, too. Pool, and Velocity. Ping pong in the Mess Hall. Rings, we had a ring toss game in one of the holodeck programs. We used to arm wrestle in that program, too. Some people played Kal-toh, I always thought that was boring. Kadis Kot. Do you play Kadis Kot? We brought that game back from the DQ and now people play it here. And we would bet on everything, just everything. [laughter] Everything! The games, obviously, but we'd have big pools on just about anything you could think of. How many M-Class planets would we find in the next month? How long until such-and-such a couple got together? I lost a lot of replicator rations, I forget how many, but it was a big amount, on when Samantha Wildman would have her baby. I missed it by one day. Of course, the shit hit the fan that day, anyway. But yeah, we would bet on anything. The Captain used to say, we're alone out here, we can't get new music or holonovels from the Federation, we have to make our own culture. I guess gambling was a part of our culture. Gambling, and complaining about the food. [laughter]
Interviewer: How was the food?
Sharr: Awful! Disgusting, the worst! [laughter] Actually, it was pretty decent. Our cook, Neelix, was Talaxian, of course, and most of the time he was assisted by Chell, a Bolian. So their tastes weren't exactly in line with most of the crew. Not to mention the fact that the ingredients available in the Delta Quadrant were all unfamiliar to us. But we had to save the replicators for stuff we couldn't get any other way. We knew that was important, so we ate in the Mess Hall. And Neelix especially would bend over backwards to try and fix us our favorites, even if he had none of the ingredients and had never heard of the dish. We all appreciated that. But we still complained. Our culture, right? It was what we did. Leola Root? UGH! It's kind of funny, I've never been on another ship where the Mess Hall was used that much. There were a lot of times when we'd eat in there even if we had replicated our food. You could go in there at 0300 and there'd be a pot of coffee on the counter and probably someone sitting in a corner working on something. Usually the Captain, or B'Elanna. We had parties in there, of course. Concerts, a science fair. I remember the kids having school in there, Seven having them do art projects. Weddings, baby showers, funerals. I don't think I've ever really thought before about how, how much that room was the heart of the ship, in a way. I'm getting a little sentimental about it now.
Interviewer: What would you say were your best and worst memories from Voyager?
Sharr: [silence]
Interviewer: Take your time.
Sharr: Just gathering my thoughts. [silence] The worst memory, for me, was the Hirogen. I still have trouble from an injury I got during all that. Agonizing pain shooting down from my shoulder to my fingertips. Not as often as I used to, thankfully. Doctors usually tell me it's psychosomatic. Our Doctor, Voyager's EMH, he always thought it was a type of phantom limb pain, even though he reattached my arm with no trouble. Well. In my head or whatever, it still hurts like a bitch. You know, now that I think about it, I guess it's pretty ironic that I call that my worst memory since I don't actually remember it. Not the getting hurt part, anyway. But I remember listening to the Doctor going through this long, long list of everything that had happened to me, my injuries. And I was really a long time getting over that. I guess I'm still not over it, since my arm still hurts sometimes. And there are some other things, the duplicate crew the Vidiians found. The memorial to that massacre. I try not to think about those situations if I can help it. And some things that still, well, after all these years, I still have conflicting feelings about Tuvix. And the Equinox. [silence] But anyway, I'd rather talk about happy memories. I have a lot of them! Prixin, and birthday parties, weddings and babies. Sometimes we'd even have shore leave that wasn't a complete disaster. [laughter] I can't really choose just one thing, so I'll tell you a funny story about the Captain. [laughter] The Captain, she, she's really interested in classic Earth literature. And she had this holonovel that apparently she brought with her from the Alpha Quadrant. It was . . . Jane Eyre? Or Little House on the Prairie? No, that was farmers. I'm not much into books from that time period myself. But this holonovel was rich people in a big mansion. You played as a teacher who lived in the house and took care of the kids. The father was a widower and you had a romance with him. And the other main character was the housekeeper, who was also in love with the father, and you had a rivalry with her. Her name was Mrs. Hamilton. Templeton. Hamilton? We're going to go with Hamilton. That's important later. Anyway, the captain played this thing and she just loved it and she tried to get some of the other officers to play it, too, but no one wanted to. I got bored just reading the description. And the female costumes were terrible, heavy dresses, floor length, with two or three other heavy long skirts under them. Not my scene. Well, the captain left the thing in the ship's database for the rest of us and we all ignored it, great. A few years pass. Tom Paris, who designed most of our holoprograms, he's a real genius, he was going through the database looking for stuff to adapt and he found a bunch of old programs and started messing with them for fun. He got an old one of Commander Tuvok's that had a Vulcan temple or something similar and changed all the monks' clothing into pajamas. Actually, some people think that might have been Harry Kim. But it was most definitely Tom who got hold of the Captain's holonovel. He changed the housekeeper into a Romulan. A very attractive female Romulan. Nothing dirty, just a really fine looking lady. And word got around and all of a sudden, people wanted to play this boring old holonovel, right? I played it! [laughter] Anyway, eventually it got back to the Captain that people were getting interested in it and she decided she'd play it again, too. [laughter] No one told her, of course, why it was suddenly so much better. So I'm sitting there one day, in the Mess Hall, with Tom and B'Elanna Torres and Harry, and in walks the Captain. In her floor length dress and all. And she calls out in that voice of hers: "LIEUTENANT PARIS! WHO TURNED MRS. HAMILTON INTO A SEXY ROMULAN?!" [laughter] [indistinct] [laughter] I'm sorry. Oh, boy. Maybe you had to be there to get the full effect? But I'm still laughing about that, almost forty years later!
Interviewer: I notice that you still call Janeway 'The Captain' even though she retired as an admiral. Is there a reason for that?
Sharr: We always called her 'The Captain'. Rarely did we say "Captain Janeway". Unless we were talking about her to strangers. I really don't know why. Part of our culture? Nowadays she likes us to call her 'Kathryn'. And I do. But when I think about the old days, I always think of her as 'The Captain'.
Interviewer: Final question. When you were in the Delta Quadrant, did you believe you were going to make it home?
Sharr: Absolutely. Well, wait. No. [laughter] That's a great answer, isn't it? What I mean is, in the beginning, I kind of vacillated back and forth. Sometimes it depended on my mood, or who I had been talking to. There were people like Harry Kim, who never had a single doubt. Other people were more pessimistic. But I remember, very distinctly, the moment when I knew we were going to get home. We were on that planet, the one where Seska and the Kazon dumped us when they hijacked Voyager. Hogan had just gotten killed, the Captain had been ordering us to eat bugs. Naomi was a tiny baby at that time, she was sick, and I'd been trying to help Sam and Kes with her. It got dark, and very, very cold, and no one could get a fire started. Then someone, I can't remember if it was Harry or Commander Chakotay, but someone got the idea that we could start fires using people's hair. The Captain had really long hair at that time, almost waist length, and of course she was the first person to volunteer. My own hair was quite short then so I didn't have anything to offer, but I was sitting across from where the Captain and B'Elanna Torres had laid down on the ground, and they had their heads on rocks with their hair stretched out tight, and Chakotay was sitting behind the Captain hacking at her hair with a smaller rock. Hacking at it. I could see her face. And I had an epiphany. Or, or maybe, maybe it was like a premonition? I don't know. But there we were, on this horrible planet, freezing, sick baby, no water, no food, no ship, and I looked at the Captain's face and I knew with absolute certainty that she was going to get us home. I know! I know it sounds crazy! Maybe I was so desperate that I was a little crazy. But I was so sure. And after that, anytime we got into a tough situation or I got depressed and started doubting, I remembered the Captain's face when they were cutting off her hair, and I felt confident again. You know, I've never told her that. I guess she'll find out when she watches these interviews. [silence] I'm thinking now about some of the young officers who served under my command later. I would have felt, well, pretty damn awkward if they hero worshipped me the way some of us did the Captain. Not everyone, obviously. But Harry, Tom, me, even Neelix in a way, we all definitely did. She was larger than life to us. We loved her. We still love her. She got us home, like she always said she would.