In late 2376, in [#143 Fury], USS Voyager receives a distress call from a small vessel on an intercept course. On board the small craft is a single Ocampa, according to Voyager's initial scans. Upon answering the subsequent hail Voyager's crew is surprised to learn that the occupant is Kes, a former crewmember who departed three years previously to develop her powerful mental abilities and to protect Voyager because her inabillity to completely control her powers had caused increasing structural damage.

Janeway happily grants Kes' request to board Voyager, but Janeway and the crew at that time are unaware that Kes has become bitter and vengeful toward them during her years away. Kes uses the vessel in which she travels to ram Voyager, causing a hull breach on deck 9, and beams aboard the ship immediately beforehand. Kes harnesses the energy from Voyager's warp-core to travel back in time to 56 days 17 hours after Voyager arrived in the Delta Quadrant. She comes up behind the version of herself from that time period, renders her unconscious and stores her in the airponics bay, then tries to carry out a plan to deliver ship and crew to a Vidiian ship so that the Vidiians can harvest the body organs of Voyager's crew - it would be Kes' revenge for, as she sees it, the crew corrupting her by exposing her to the ideals of exploration, and meanwhile she would ensure that the earlier version of herself returned to Ocampa. However Janeway thwarts the plan, in the process having to kill the later Kes, then persuades the earlier version of Kes to make a holo-recording for the future when events would start to play out again.

The younger Kes makes the following message for the later Kes, which persuades her not to go through with her plan to deliver Voyager to the Vidiians but instead to return to the Ocampa homeworld: "Remember me? the innocent child you're here to save? You blame Captain Janeway but the choice was yours. You made the decision to leave Ocampa and you made the decision to leave Voyager. If you're watching me now, you've come back to take revenge on the people who cared about you. That's not who you are and it's not who I am. Don't do this. Find another way home. Captain Janeway will help you if you give her a chance. Try to remember who you were. Try to remember me."

The vessel in which Kes travels is of unknown origin (but see Behind-the-scenes/Blooper info on page 2). It has a fairly cramped interior. It includes a number of sophisticated sytems, including full life-support, the ability to engage in direct audio-visual communication from the small forward-facing cockpit, and a remote-controlled personal transport which allows her to beam onto Voyager shortly before the shuttle hits it. It is not stated on tv how long Kes has been searching for Voyager but the shuttlecraft seems capable of long distances and has, moreover, been fitted out to withstand Kes' often violently powerful levels of neurogenic energy which, when she was aboard Voyager, caused damage to both the ship's structure and systems.

The tough exterior of Kes' shuttlecraft is constructed from a series of dark grey flat plates which cover the single piece vessel, producing a protective outer shell around the narrow forward nose section which houses the single occupant cockpit, and the compact drive section directly behind. The nose of the vessel is fairly long compared to the total length of the ship, with the pilot's seat facing a sloping secitonal viewing port that gives limited forward vision. There are no smaller windows to the cockpit's sides which could provide all-round vision, and in that respect the shuttlecraft differs from many or most space vessels of its size so far encountered in Alpha Quadrant and Delta Quadrant space. A series of four indented plates run along the outer hull to the left and right of the pilot, curving downward and outward to form the widest part of the ship's hull. The forward part of the shipis of a flattened snub-nose design, protected by narrower plates around its exterior.

The underside of the nose features a raised rectangular shaped panel running down its central section, which terminates in a ridge running directly below Kes' seated position within the cockpit. The ship's forward section angles inward to connect with the drive section from this point, with the connection terminating where the small upper and lower vertically-mounted stabilising fins protrude from the underside and upper side of the drive section. The fins are very narrow, and they bear a series of marking of unknown meaning on their sides; if Kes obtained the shuttlecraft from a spacefaring civilisation and adapted it to her needs, these markings could be the logo or other insignia of that civilisation. The fins act to separate the twin sets of engines mounted on the upper and lower surfaces of the port and starboard wings. These short wings are angled downward, and they terminate in long rectangular pods which contain small bright nvigation lights which flash in sequence when the vehicle is travelling. A similar red-coloured beacon glows above Kes' cockpit when the vessel is in flight, giving a visual indication of the ship's attitude from a distance.

The maximum speed and range of the shuttlecraft is unknown and is not stated on tv. The four-engine configuration, however, indicates that the ship is designed for high speeds and/or long range travel. The engines mounted on the underside of the port and starboard wings are smaller than the upper set in both their diameter and length, with the curved venturi nozzles at the stern having a smaller opening than the larger set mounted between the upper surface of the wings and the sides of the top stabilising fin direct above. The ship's stern ends in a protruding hexagonal flat plate, with the four-engine exhausted arranged slightly forward of its position above and below.

The exhaust ports emit a bright green glow when the ship is under impulse power, and tv footage demonstrates that the ship is highly maneuverable at sublight speeds.

Next page: drawings of the port and dorsal views of Kes' shuttlecraft.