With the end of The Captain’s Secret, I’m currently hard at work writing the side-quel, “Secret’s End.” As you may recall from the first spoiler sentences post, there were a few sentences which came from scenes that appear in this version of the story, not that one. I decided to make a new spoiler post with those sentences and a few new ones!
I will periodically update this post with more. Spoilers after the cut!
When she looked up again, it was with fierce determination despite the tears and snot dribbling down to her chin.
“You still have the most wonderful face.”
“I will do this for your captain if you do something for mine.”
“Since when do you consider me a fellow anything?”
“These are my people.”
She slapped him.
“‘For a good time, call Lalana’ is scrawled on the walls of the intergalactic bathroom of the cosmos,” said Groves, sweeping his hand through the air in illustration of the words.
“It is an environment where a young woman like Michael would be readily recognized for her talents.”
Saru felt eminently better then, feeling less that he had failed Lalana in their friendship and more that their mutual misunderstanding was a bridge linking their experiences together.
Something occurred to Lorca. “I might. You know the Briar Patch?”
They arrived in the quiet of the night. The lights were dim, the stars outside the window solid streaks of light.
Lalana tasted the truth immediately. Her pupils went wide and she pressed her hands together tightly. “Impossible.”
“I didn’t sign up to be a glorified taxi driver,” said Lorca dryly, “but we do have the stars.”
The truth in this bled through into the story he was telling.
“What the hell am I supposed to do in here,” grumbled Lorca, sour-faced.
“How will we know if this works?” asked Mischkelovitz.
“The best things we are we get from our mothers.”
“After what he has done, I do not think he deserves this,” said Saru.
There was something beautiful in that.
“Sometimes dishonesty is logical.”
Saru decided Lorca had gone too far. The human capacity for self-centered callousness always reared its ugly head in the end.
“Captain,” he said. “Captain Gabriel Lorca, USS Buran.”
--- ADDED 9/8/18 ---
“I like you. Is that not enough?”
“Sand gets everywhere. It’s a terrible idea.”
He was gone, like so many others.
--- ADDED 9/20/18 ---
“Perhaps I should consider seeking other assignment.”
There was something on Lorca’s face which suggested this was not the first time that idea had crossed his mind.
“There’s no music,” said Mischkelovitz with rising panic. “There’s no music!”
This still explained nothing. O'Malley wondered if it was even possible to get her to explain in a way he would understand and sighed. Probably best to accept the words for what they were and move on.
“You crashed my ship!”
“It could have been worse,” said Levy.
Saru found something true in both of their viewpoints.
Her fur began to writhe. “It is a lului concern.”
All lului had green eyes, but these ones, he knew from the moment he looked at them, were hers.
“The last thing you’re ever gonna hear is my voice whispering in your ear.”
-- ADDED 11/09/18
The eggs and toast were no longer piping hot.
“We might be better off without him.”
See you again soon, Captain. Again for the first time.
The Cardenas class is a comparably large ship type that is in service in the mid-23rd century. The design features a saucer with a small boxy engineering hull at its aft end and four angular nacelles on pylons that are arranged as an "X"
A/N: Welcome, to the long-awaited moment. Again, if you do not want your heart broken, skip to the next chapter when it's available.
I couldn't bear to interfere with fortune given what was looming over the horizon, so this was another "pulled it and used it" blind draw.
Additionally, I have glossed over the exact details of the Buran event given that the show may reveal more about it, and I don't want to be too locked in to anything descriptively. If further details come out in the show, expect revisions accordingly (and I will announce any changes as they are made).
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
<< 41 - War
43 - Tumbling Down >>
"Captain, may I speak to you?"
Ek'Ez was out of sickbay again. Lorca said nothing and went immediately into his ready room with the doctor. This time, he did not provide the courtesy of sparing Ek'Ez a view of the stars. It was not an intentional slight. He had to remain behind the desk in order to keep an eye on the bridge from his desk console. Even a split second of inattention could cost them the advantage if they were attacked.
"Let's hear it," said Lorca.
Ek'Ez's eyes were blinking in rapid discomfort. "Captain, I do not know what the right course of action is." For a doctor who had taken several courses on ethics and morality in his training, Ek'Ez seemed to run into a lot of moral quandaries he was unable to solve on his own. Perhaps it was a case of too much knowledge getting in the way of decision-making. Paralysis of choice. "But I believe there is a medical situation aboard which may necessitate your intervention. The issue is, if I tell you about it, even the slightest details, it will be a gross violation of doctor patient confidentiality."
"This is war," said Lorca, a sentence he was getting tired of telling people. "We don't have time for pleasantries. Is someone on my crew compromised?"
"That is the problem, captain. The issue, while medical in nature, is not of the sort that would affect the performance of the individual in question, professionally-speaking, but there are... other factors in play which may merit the removal of the individual from the ship."
Ek'Ez was using a lot of words to say very little. Lorca rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Ek, you're gonna have to give me more than that."
"If someone has a medical condition which is not life-threatening and does not affect their work, are they entitled to their privacy if there is a chance their condition may affect others?"
"Are you saying this person has something contagious?"
"No, not at all. But, this person's continued presence on the ship would endanger another by exposure. And owing to the nature of the exposure, it is not possible to separate the person who is endangered from the person who is causing the danger. Or rather, it would be, but the person with the power to remove the danger refuses to do so."
The more explanation Ek'Ez offered, the more convoluted and confusing the scenario became. "If someone on the crew is endangering someone else on the crew, doctor, that would constitute valid grounds for you to tell me what the hell is going on."
"What if the endangered person is not a member of the crew?"
Lorca's eyes went wide. "Are you telling me we have a stowaway on onboard?"
"I would not term it like that, captain, no."
"Dr. Ek'Ez. If Lalana is on board this ship, you need to tell me now." There was absolutely no questioning that tone.
Ek'Ek's eyes blinked in a line of confusion and surprise. "Lalana? Why would Lalana be on the ship?"
Lorca relaxed slightly. "She does have a history." She had also apparently appointed herself some sort of Starfleet intelligence operative, meaning she might potentially fit the description of personnel who were not crew.
"I have not seen Lalana in person in some years. I merely offer her medical advice when she contacts me. I assure you, captain, no one unauthorized has come aboard to the best of my knowledge. Perhaps I should consult with Commander Benford instead."
Ek'Ez's wording was very slippery. Someone endangered who was not a member of the crew, had not come aboard, and yet could not be separated from the danger posed by a crew member. Lorca realized why Ek'Ez was being so slippery. The mere nature of the question made obvious the patient. "I thought that was on ice for now."
All four of Ek'Ez's eyes went wide. In his desire to seek the captain's counsel, he had said too much. "Captain, as I am bound by doctor-patient confidentiality..." Ek'Ez pressed his hands together. He looked and sounded dejected. "Which I fear I have just broken..."
There was a time and a place for confidentiality, Lorca decided, and this was not it. The reason had nothing to do with him being captain. In fact, he strongly suspected the only reason he had not been brought into the loop sooner was because he was the captain, and he had the power to put an end to it if he chose to do so, and they did not want that power of choice taken away from them.
"Ak'vek'mov," said Lorca. He very, very rarely used Ek'Ez's given name, which was a clear indicator of the seriousness of this. "You're not just responsible for the physical welfare of this crew, but their mental welfare, too. Clearly, we are dealing with compromised mental welfare here."
There was shame in Ek'Ez's voice, but also desperation to defend himself. "But can we truly say someone is psychologically compromised merely because we don't agree with their decisions? They may have sound reasons."
"People always think their reasoning is sound, especially when it isn't," said Lorca.
"I... apologize, captain. Truly I have failed you. The mental states of others have never been my strong point. And... the patient suggested the war would end and render the question moot."
That was the most recklessly optimistic thing Lorca had ever heard. He half-sighed, half-growled. "Get back to sickbay, doctor. And... It isn't your fault. They put you in an impossible situation."
He took a deep breath and stood with his hands pressed against his desk for a few moments before he made the call.
She arrived looking confused as to why she was there. "Is something the matter, captain?"
"I didn't call you here as your captain, Daisy." He pushed the bowl of fortune cookies in her direction. She timidly took one, unable to hide the trepidation she felt.
Lorca remembered what he had said to Benford on the day of the Buran's launch, the tactic he had tried to live by in the years following. Stand to keep them on their toes, sit to make them comfortable. If he could have afforded the inattention to the bridge, he would have taken her to the conference room right then and there. Had Benford been on the bridge when his ship had been captured? Or had it been during the precious six hours or less every captain had to allot for sleep? Had Benford been eating or showering or any of the other million little necessary distractions? Had he been paying attention? Had it been at all a preventable tragedy?
Yoon ate her cookie. She glanced at the fortune but did not read it aloud. Collaborate with those who possess both intelligence and integrity. She shook faintly.
If she had not understood the reason for her presence when she walked in, she certainly seemed to have figured it out now.
"Is there something you want to tell me, Daisy?"
Clearly the answer to that was no, she did not want to tell him, but equally clearly she had to. She shivered like a leaf. "I'm sorry, I tried, I swear I tried, but it was all so sudden, and then I couldn't explain why I hadn't said anything in the first place..." Tears dripped down her cheeks. "And every day it got more and more hard to explain why I hadn't said anything..."
"Then why didn't Reiko tell me?"
Yoon hiccoughed through her tears.
Lorca inhaled slowly. Surely not. Surely she hadn’t...
"I was going to make her a fancy meal and surprise her with the news and then... everything happened all at once."
Fourteen weeks. The timeline had to be fourteen weeks because that was when the war had started. She had managed to hide this from her own wife for fourteen weeks. How, he didn't know. There was no significant visible change from where he was standing, but even with the long shifts and everything happening, surely Morita still saw Yoon naked on a regular basis.
But they were under an immense amount of stress. Everyone looked and felt different these days. Maybe it was possible to go fourteen weeks without knowing, mentally excusing the signs as being stress, not what they really were. Or maybe they weren't sleeping together as they used to. The shifts were bad, the stress was high, and Yoon had reason to avoid anything that might tip Morita off.
Lorca pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. "I should have put you on leave the minute you started this course of action." But at the time, the circumstances had not been extraordinary, so there was no need to pull her from duty just for trying to get pregnant. There wasn't normally cause to pull someone from duty for pregnancy until they requested it.
On some level he was furious with Yoon. Mostly he was just empty. "We're getting you off this ship. And you're telling Reiko now. Not tonight, not tomorrow. Do I make myself clear?"
She sniffled, but nodded. "She's going to hate me. I hate me." She began to sob.
There wasn’t quite room in Lorca's mind for genuine compassion, but he managed something approximating it. "She'll be happy and angry, but she won't hate you."
It was pitiful watching her. Lorca went into the bathroom, risking eight seconds of less-than-constant bridge vigilance, and returned with a cloth for Yoon to wipe her face with.
Yoon dabbed at her eyes. "People are going to think I did this intentionally to get out of this war." Medical records would say otherwise, but people did tend to think and say the worst when they did not have all the facts.
"Daisy, anyone who goes so far as to get pregnant to avoid combat shouldn’t be in this war to begin with." The fact that she had stayed in it for fourteen weeks despite the circumstance beggared belief.
"If something happens to Reiko and I'm not here..."
"You'll live, and so will... she?"
"He. It's a boy."
Lorca called Morita to the ready room and went out onto the bridge and sat in the captain's chair, pensively chewing on his lip. They couldn't leave this area, there had been several active Klingon sightings, and it was probably a bad idea to send Yoon off on a shuttle in light of that.
Something occurred to him. He began to compose a message.
Lalana: I don't know where you are, but if you're out there, I need you to come and get Daisy from the Buran. Please. I'm sorry for what I said. You have every right to fight this war with us. He encrypted it on a classified top secret subspace band and hoped it reached her.
Whether she got the message, he did not know. He did not receive a response. After a few minutes, Arzo offered a sharp tone of alarm:
"Captain, we're detecting an energy signature."
These days, the slightest sign of trouble was enough to draw Lorca up from his chair, and he jumped up and strode towards the science station in two long steps, half his attention still on the viewscreen for any sudden sign of trouble. "Klingon?"
Arzo operated the controls swiftly, working hard to compensate for some sort of interference. "Unknown. Possibly. I am having trouble locking on. The signal is intermittent."
"What's your analysis? Malfunctioning cloak?"
"That is one possibility. It may also be a spatial anomaly, but..."
"Spatial anomalies," said Lorca bitterly. Those weren't something starships encountered any more. "Yellow alert. Contact the nearest starbase and inform them of our situation."
Over at the communications console, Kerrigan's brow furrowed. "Sir. We're being jammed!"
"Red alert!"
"Sir, we're losing—"
"Systems critical!" cried Levy.
"I can't—" Morita screamed as the console exploded in her face, throwing her backwards with plasma burns. Yoon was still on the bridge and dropped down beside Morita, putting an arm around Morita's shoulders and helping her up.
Everything was going wrong around them. Every system alarm was blaring and the crew was frantically trying to contain what was happening from every possible angle. An explosion from the warp core rocked the ship, pitching Lorca forward because he was standing as always, never mind the reckless danger. There was a tremendously bright light. Lorca's hand closed around something.
There was a massive explosion. The Buran split apart as if every conduit had suddenly burst all at once, destroying the ship from within with a massive chain reaction of fire, plasma, and light. It was so bright it was enough to blind. Ribbons of energy spewed across the cosmos.
Amidst the chaos a single escape pod went flying outwards. For a moment, it seemed the escape pod would not make it. Bright blue energy overtook the pod, sweeping across its surface with a crackle of burning intensity. The pod held and hurtled onward into the darkness, towards the uncertain pinpricks of distant stars. It disappeared into the distance, lost.
Only as the waves of energy and pulses of light dwindled to their inevitable conclusion did the full extent of the destruction become apparent. The remains of the Buran and a Klingon cruiser were almost impossible to distinguish. They had been reduced to chunks of metal like shrapnel, barely anything left of their bones.
Amidst the debris drifted a well-worn copy of Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, its cover and pages charred halfway to stardust, no trace remaining of the fortune that had once lain between pages fifty and fifty-one.
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
<< 39 - The Lonely Machine
41 - War >>
Every time Lorca set foot on the Gabriella, there were more fortunes lining the wall. He could trace them all the way back to the first one she had saved: "If you fail to try, you never succeed." It was yellowed with age now, as were the ones around it, but the further along he went, the lighter the paper became. The most recent ones were still bright white.
Each one represented something they shared. Here was a dinner on a moon with a pink sky: "Don't wait for your ship to sail in, swim out to it." This one came from a meeting at a starbase: "Even the sky seems small from the bottom of a well." Lalana had taken a moment with that fortune and then recontextualized it in a way that fit Luluan: "You cannot see the limitless possibility of the sky from the bottom of an underground pond."
He knew which one was her favorite, but it took him a moment to find it. "To reach distant places, you must take the first step." She had loved that one the moment he opened it, and even though it had been his fortune, he agreed it was supposed to be hers and traded for "You have a magnetic personality." (A fortune so useless he hated it every time he saw it.)
Their sham marriage certificate was on the wall, too. "Heyliell" Lorla and Eleanor, as witnessed by Sollis and Caxus at the Winowa on Risa. He bit his lip against the grin forming on his face. It was his favorite paper on the wall. The way the registrar had looked, the outlandishness of it all as he and Lalana tried to one-up each other's lies. Her lies were bigger, truly, but the blatant fake coughing was what really made the performance soar.
Then he remembered why he was here on the Gabriella and the smile faded. It was time to go back. It was time to stop running.
Lorca sat down beside Lalana at the front of the ship and watched out the side window as the Buran vanished into the lines of starlight. He had a pair of cookies with him, as always.
"Live a life you love," read hers.
"Sometimes you just need a change in perspective," said his.
They ate their cookies together. "You know," he said, letting her wipe the crumbs off him with her tail (zero waste; this allowed her to eat the crumbs), "they finally figured out those molecules Umale sent the Federation."
"Oh? What were they?"
"Tree medicine."
Lalana clicked her tongue. "That makes good sense! He would not have sent medicine for people, since he does not like them, but all lului like trees. Even ones who choose to live on starships." She had a small garden, nothing like Yoon's setup on the Buran, but enough to provide a splash of living green in virtually every corner of the ship. "Are you tired? I know it is late on the Buran right now. I readied the cot for you."
The cot sat beneath the hammock she used as a bed when she slept, which he now knew was a rare event. Most of the time she only pretended to. It was a pretense he enjoyed. "I'll just watch the stars for a bit."
"They are beautiful, aren't they?" They seemed to be going by at a noticeably faster speed that usual. He said as much. "Oh, I have upgraded the engines again and rerouted most of the power to them. The Gabriella is much faster than a Starfleet vessel now. Or rather, you can go this speed, but I can maintain it for an entire journey, whereas you would burn out your engines or maybe worse. We are actually not going at top speed right now because I turned on some life support systems for you."
"So sorry to inconvenience you with my continuing need for life," he drawled at her in amusement, and she clicked laughter right back. "It is nice, though, having a starship captain at your beck and call."
"Oh, it is the best!" Though she had no ability to make any expression, he could tell she was smirking at him all the same.
He drummed his fingers on the console. "How about some music?"
"Yes! Space is so much better with a soundtrack."
He scrolled through her music archive. It just seemed to get bigger and bigger every time he saw it. Every world she visited, she took its music with her as a memento, more than probably even she could listen to in her lifetime, especially when she kept returning to the same few songs over and over.
He could have put on God Only Knows and would have done it for her, but instead he picked an alternative they both liked.
"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy..."
Except for visits to Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco, Lorca had not set foot anywhere else on Earth in over two decades. Seeing it now, that little blue-white swirl amidst the backdrop of the stars, he almost told Lalana to turn the ship around. A heavy weight had settled onto his shoulders. Nothing about this was easy.
Lalana had to get clearance to land her ship close to their destination. "I have a special dispensation," she informed traffic control, and transmitted the allowance she had been granted by the Federation to land her ship as needed on Federation worlds. Never transporting was a constant hassle. She always had to take the long way to get where she was going. Flight control supplied her with a path and they entered the atmosphere.
Most people felt elation, contentment at coming home. Lorca felt a mild sense of dread. He reached out and touched Lalana on the shoulder. "Slow down." Sometimes the long way was preferable.
"I am observing the speed—oh, this is not the problem, is it? I will slow us. But the destination is the same no matter how long we take to get there." For once, the fortune cookie sentiment was no comfort.
Lorca gave in to the urge to stand up and moved behind his seat, leaning against the headrest as the landscape began to resolve itself into familiar geography.
He was startled to see how much had not changed, and strangely upset to see how so much had. Familiar buildings were gone, unfamiliar buildings had appeared. Businesses had moved or closed and new ones opened. The steeple of the old church rose above the trees, but on the far side of it was some sort of fancy recreational center. There was the park he had gone to as a child, but gone was the playground, replaced by a large open field for sports. There was a new playground of an entirely different design where once had been a picnic area. He recognized the street where the first girl he'd kissed lived, but her house wasn't there.
He realized he was a stranger. The whole way here, he had been hoping the entire town was gone, replaced by something completely unrecognizable, and now it turned out he didn't want a single part of it to have changed. Every bit of it that changed was erasing some part of who he was, of who his parents had been.
He had been running away from a place that hadn't existed in years. Probably it had ceased to exist the moment he left. He inhaled shakily. He didn't want it to be erased, any of it. It felt like he was the one being erased, and so were his parents.
The ship landed in a small cargo port. The stiff December air had a cold bite to it that was entirely familiar. The particular mix of trees in the region, even in December when the world was cold and barren, gave the air a faint aroma completely unique to the region.
Lorca helped Lalana put on a heated thermal suit. Cold remained her greatest weakness. It reminded him a little of the first thing he'd seen her wearing, that puffy jumpsuit he'd helped her take off, but this time the clothing was specially designed to suit her range of motion, not restrict it, and it was a navy blue shade with white piping Lorca suspected Lalana had chosen as an homage to a Starfleet uniform.
They had clearance for twenty-four hours. The man at the cargo port was about the same age as Lorca. Had they gone to school together? Had they known each other? Did he recognize Lorca? If they had met, they had both grown so differently over the years, there was no recognizing either of them. Maybe this man had only moved to the town after Lorca left. Somehow, that was even worse, because Lorca's mind had never given this man permission to move here, and yet this man was not only present, he was less a stranger here than Lorca was.
When Lorca exhaled, he could see his breath in the cold air. "It's a bit of a walk. We can get a taxi."
"I do not mind," said Lalana.
Their path took them past places familiar and not. Lorca tried not to dwell too much on any of it but found himself slowing to look at the things that were familiar. A furniture store was entirely the same. Not the merchandise, but the name, the building, the sign above the windows. "We bought a couch there," he said. He had been maybe eight years old. While his father dealt with the salesman, Gabriel had run around, bouncing on cushions and yelling at his parents about which couches were good and which were not based solely on how high they bounced him. The salesman said kids did it all the time and laughed it off, but his father had not laughed in the slightest, not in the store, and not later that night.
Lorca hastily resumed walking. Lalana kept pace with whatever speed he chose and said nothing.
People looked at her, because they always looked at her wherever she went, but for once it was to their advantage. It meant no one really had time to notice or recognize him. He was just some man in a long grey coat with the collar turned up walking beside a non-humanoid alien. Some thought there was something familiar in those pale blue eyes fixed sternly straight ahead, but no one got a good enough look to be certain.
They made one stop, a coffee stand. He had them heat hers almost to boiling and she drank it at that temperature while he carefully sipped at his much cooler cup to avoid scorching his tongue.
The cups ended up crumpled in his pocket as they approached their destination. The one location in any town you could count on to remain mostly unchanged. Even in a world where absolutely nothing was sacred, the idea of building on such land was abhorrent because it was this bit of land that held the promise that one day, you, too, would be interred among your loved ones, and there for many centuries would you remain, protected by the same reverence you had shown to this land in your own lifetime.
Lorca stopped at the entrance gate to the cemetery and stared out at the many graves. They no longer buried people in these plots laying down. They stood them up to make more space for families to be together. Better still were those who chose to be interred as cremains, because they took up very little real estate indeed.
After a long minute, she finally spoke. "Hayliel?"
"I need a minute." He wasn't entirely sure which was the right row of graves. There seemed to be so many. He leaned against the side of the gate. "Shit. I don't know where they are." The magnitude of this statement hit him. He stared out the graves, helpless and lost.
She knew he was coming to Earth because he had said as much when he requested the week off. When his communicator pinged off the planetary relays, she expected him to call, but he didn't, so she did a quick check after an hour to see where exactly his communicator was. It was a mild abuse of power at most. Part of her just wanted fair warning before he turned up on her doorstep, as he had done twice before, once at a most inconvenient time.
When she saw where he was, she knew something was wrong. She grabbed her coat, ordered a transport, and beamed directly into the middle of town.
She spotted him immediately. He was getting coffee from a stand. He wasn't alone.
Cornwell decided against approaching. She hung back, staring at them from across the street, and watched as they made their way towards the outskirts of town.
She could track his communicator easily enough, but she only needed to check the map of the area to realize where he was going, because she had been there with him herself many years before. She could still remember the look on his face. Absent and distracted, like he wasn't fully present. As they placed the caskets into the ground, she couldn't really blame him for being mentally not there, because it was a lot to take in at the time.
What she could blame him for, and had done, was failing to deal with the aftermath of it. Despite her urging, despite her pleading, he had taken a stance of complete and utter denial and pretended nothing was wrong. "It's fine," he had told her, over and over and over again, until finally he stopped answering when she asked the question and accused her of being the one with the problem. When an assignment on a starship had taken him far away, he had never needed to listen to her ask the question ever again, and she had not tried since.
Twenty years was apparently how long it took him to ask the question of himself.
She trailed after them, watching the blip on her padd, wishing she had thought to grab a hat and a scarf, or maybe a coffee at that stand. She couldn't decide if she was doing this because she was his friend and she was worried about him, or because she was confused as to why he was there with Lalana instead of her. A little of both.
Cornwell didn't actively try to avoid being discovered. Sneaking around made what she was doing feel wrong. She walked out in the open, completely conspicuous in her Starfleet uniform coat with its piping and pips denoting her rank as admiral, and merely stayed far back enough that the question of whether she was spying on them was never quite raised. Not until they finally arrived at the cemetery and stopped moving. Then she watched from a distance as Lorca seemed to freeze at the cemetery gates, unable or unwilling to go farther.
She watched as Lalana stretched up against him with absolute ease, as if she had done this many times before, and wrapped her tail across his shoulder. It looked like she was whispering something into his ear. Then she withdrew, entered the graveyard, and began swiftly striding through the graves, turning her head as she did. Cornwell stepped behind a tree and waited until she heard a distant call of summons. When Cornwell peered back around the tree, she saw Lalana leading Lorca by the hand towards the side of the cemetery where his parents' graves were.
When Lorca wiped a hand across his face, Cornwell realized he was crying. When he knelt down and put his hand against the ground and Lalana brushed her tail across those same tears on his face, Cornwell decided she had made a terrible mistake giving in to her baser instincts and immediately called for a beam-out back to San Francisco.
She also realized something. It seemed crazy to her at first, but then it made a strange sense. Two years ago, Risa. A captain not in Starfleet.
It would have been a simple matter to check the ship's registry and confirm whether or not the Gabriella had been on Risa, but Cornwell decided against it. Enough was enough. He was entitled to whatever life he wanted to have.
Two days later, Lorca was in Cornwell's office, looking as good as she had ever seen him, smirking that impossible smirk at her. "Cutting it a little close, aren't you?" she asked. He was due back on the Buran in under forty-eight hours.
"I've got a fast ride," he said jovially. "I'll be back before the New Year. Now, you've got those science officers for me?"
She did, several candidates. They sat and reviewed them together. "Huh. Would you look at that. I've met this one, actually. Saru. He was on my ship. What was it, seven years ago? Triton, not the Buran."
"Did he make a good impression?"
Lorca squinted. "Can't say he did. Bit of the opposite." There was also the memory of hearing Saru argue with the person who had eventually ended up as Georgiou's first officer, Michael Burnham.
"I would strongly consider him, he's a good candidate with everything you're looking for."
"Sure," said Lorca noncommittally. "How about this one here. Andrea Basily."
"She's pretty," noted Cornwell.
Lorca blew a quick raspberry and pushed the padd with her file away. "Nevermind," he said, rolling his eyes.
Cornwell snorted. "I didn't mean you shouldn't pick her."
Lorca fixed Cornwell with a look. "You free tonight?"
After the cemetery, Cornwell had not expected him to express any interest. "Aren't you still seeing that captain? The one from Risa?"
"It's a flexible situation," he said, beaming with what looked like genuine pride in this arrangement. He chuckled. "Come on, Kat."
Cornwell looked at him long and hard. Those twinkling eyes, the arc of his raised eyebrows, the crinkles of happiness on his face, that positively impish smile, the way he was tracing circles with his free hand on the table. She leaned her head on her hand and smiled at him. "Fine. But I'm in charge."
"You're the admiral, admiral."
Lorca invited Lalana to celebrate the new year on the Buran with the usual warning: "No stowing away."
"Seven years, you never let me forget," she said, but her hands were spinning. If he reminded her every day from now until the end of time, she would not mind it.
When the Gabriella jumped to warp two days later, Morita said, "I'm glad she finally got her ship. She spent so many years trying to make one..."
Lorca turned in his chair and blinked. "What?"
Morita looked equally confused. She thought no one knew Lalana better than him. "On Luluan. She kept trying to build her own spaceship after the invaders came the first time, and the other lului kept breaking it."
"She never told me that."
"Maybe she was embarrassed. I heard about it from Lualen."
Lorca turned back to the stars on the viewscreen. Lalana was right where she belonged, and so was he.
