“The Haunting of Deck Twelve” is episode twenty-five of season six of Star Trek: Voyager.
Neelix is shutting down an empty mess hall, though he looks a bit nervous. Then bumps into Seven of Nine on the way out, who makes him jump. Neelix admits he’s a little jumpy after what happened last time. Seven says they are shutting down main power and the children’s regeneration cycle will be interrupted. They require supervision. Neelix is happy to help, but this could take a few hours. How much do they know about what’s happening? Nothing; Seven doesn’t want to alarm them. Neelix doesn’t want to lie to the children if they ask questions. Seven says he has considerable childcare experiences; she’s sure he will manage.
On the bridge, engines are shut down and they coast on momentum towards a nebule. Power is turned off around the ship, with the crew going to lanterns and torches. The Doctor shuts himself down. The Borg children wake in the cargo bay to find Neelix there. There’s nothing to be concerned about. He’s not hugely convincing. The warp core is shut down and Voyager enters the nebula.
The children ask Neelix why this is being done. As a precaution as they enter a class J nebula; they don’t want to attract residual EM radiation. He’s told the shields are sufficient to stop that. Icheb wants to help Seven in astrometrics, but is told that is shut down. Mezoti wants to know why they’re entering the nebula if not to analyse it. Are they in danger? Is it connected to something on deck 12? The children know there’s an area off limits to all expect senior officers with level six clearance. Mezoti thinks it’s haunted; Naomi told her. The kids want an explanation, so Neelix starts telling them a story.
Several months before joining Voyager, they were in a nebula collecting dilithium. Neelix told Tuvok the crew are on edge. Truthfully, it’s Neelix who is. Neelix finds nebulas unsettling. As a child, an immense plasma drift passed through his system and blacked out the skies for months. All you could see was the cloud. Since then, Neelix has found them disturbing. Tuvok suggests curtains. Neelix thinks this is a great idea, though this isn’t the first time such have been suggested.
The children find a flaw with the science in Neelix’s description of collecting dilithium. The nebula started to destabilise and they stopped collecting, heading out of the nebula. An energy bolt hit Voyager, causing minor damage. But some sort of energy field was clinging to Voyager as it left. The children try to guess what it was; Neelix says they can debate it or continue with the story. They continue.
Chakotay briefs the captain in her ready room; the ship is suffering a number of malfunctions. Then she spots a meteorite cluster. Chakotay thinks it’s nothing to worry about. true; but they passed the same cluster an hour ago. Returning to the bridge, it turns out that Tom’s instruments are giving the wrong readings. They’re heading back the way they came. The ship then jumps to warp 6 and there’s no response from engineering. The ship comes to a stop and the computer starts giving out too much information.
Chakotay heads to engineering, but nearly didn’t make it due to a turbolift malfunction. He speaks to B’Elanna who has detected gel packs burnt out by the discharge they got in the nebula. They head to fix them, but there’s nothing wrong with the gel packs. The EM discharge B’Elanna detected is travelling through the bioneural circuitry.
Seven is in the cargo bay when gasses start pouring in. She has to manually override the door, but gets stopped by forcefields, enveloped by the gas and shocked by it as she collapses. Mezoti thinks Seven’s cybernetics were infiltrated and she was turned against the rest of the crew. Neelix says not.
Many systems have gone offline or are malfunctioning and Voyager eventually realise that they picked up some sort of lifeform in the nebula that is now tampering with the systems. Some of the crew are getting rather nervous. Especially Neelix and Tal Celes, seen in “Good Shephard”. The lifeform might not be outright hostile, but it could still kill them. The majority of the episode is presented as a story that Neelix is telling the children.