It took more than two weeks for Lieutenant Paxton to return to the Shenzhou owing to the ship’s mildly erratic exploratory route through the sector and the unpredictable availability of shuttlecraft for nonessential personnel transport, but return he had, with a gift of dried seaweed as justification for his presence on Saru’s doorstep. Now he was prattling on as if their prior conversation had never ended.
From Paxton’s perspective, perhaps it hadn’t. His first words to Saru were, “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” and then he launched into recounting the general details of Ensign Tackett’s memorial and Saru wondered how long was an appropriate length of time to entertain this unexpected exchange of words without seeming rude. Paxton had brought a gift and lost a friend, both things which merited extra consideration, but would the human lieutenant be aware of the point at which his presence became an intolerable imposition? Paxton’s obtuseness went above and beyond the norm. Most people were unaware of the point at which their presence became uncomfortable owing to a hefty degree of self-involvement, whereas Paxton seemed completely aware of it but unable to stop himself.
The subject of Paxton’s present description was Harold Tackett’s sister, Evelyn. “So I told her what you said about proximity, that Hack probably would’ve stopped talking to me and disappeared eventually. And he did, sort of.”
Standing there, box of seaweed in hand, Saru was shocked. It did not sound like an entirely appropriate conversational tangent for a memorial. His mental image of Paxton relaying this information to the grieving girl was borderline unforgivable.
“Do you know what she said?”
“I do not,” said Saru.
“She said there’s no such thing as proximity, because everywhere you’ve ever been is a fixed point in time and nothing can change it. So every moment you spend with someone in the past is permanent, for better or worse, and that means Harry’s only gone if you think the past stops existing, and I don’t think that, so...” Paxton smiled, weakly hopeful.
It was a very cerebral sentiment to conjure up on the spot. Saru wondered if Evelyn Tackett had known loss already or formulated the concept as a result of something else. “That is one way of looking at it.”
“Yeah. Make sense, the future is fixed as much as the past because they both continually exist.” (Saru avoided engaging on the subject and was relieved when Paxton moved on.) “Though, she also said Hack wouldn’t have stopped talking to me, which is an easy thing to say of a dead man, but she said she’d prove it.”
Saru’s head tilted. “How?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does Ensign Tackett’s sister do for a living?” Perhaps she was a quantum engineer or theoretical physicist engaged in applied temporal mechanics working on some sort of mirror or bridge in time, making that statement optimistically plausible.
“She’s a researcher for GNN.”
A journalist would not possess the requisite scientific training to breach time itself. Perhaps she had worked on a story involving temporal science. If so, she had likely been misled by the sensationalist tendency of journalists to reinterpret research into pithy headlines, conflating experiments with effective technology. Journalism was very good at igniting public imaginations and wildly ineffective at conveying the true rigors and incremental developments of real science.
Thankfully, Paxton either realized he was imposing on Saru or ran out of conversational points to make. His voice took on a tone of finality as he said, “Anyway, I know Kelpiens don’t like processed food, so I promise there’s no additives or anything in the seaweed. My gamma prepped it herself.”
“Thank you,” said Saru.
“I’ll see you around, lieutenant.”
Saru closed the door at last, glad for the chance to return to spending his off-duty hours reviewing new species reports. He opened the corner of the gift box and took a piece of seaweed. It had the delightfully robust, salty taste of Earth’s Pacific Ocean. Kelp for a Kelpien. Anyone else might have been making a joke at Saru’s expense, but there was no denying his species loved the stuff. Coming from Paxton the gesture was, he decided, entirely a thoughtful one.
It was entirely obvious to Captain Georgiou. In the weeks since Tackett’s and Combs’ deaths, Ensign Hasimova’s work had suffered. The young officer was struggling in a way reminiscent of her first few weeks on the ship and Georgiou decided it was time to intercede.
The pot of tea was already ready when Hasimova arrived in the ready room, looking the very picture of youthful promise and potential. The soft lighting seemed almost to glow across her dusky cheekbones and the coil of hair atop her head was as elegant as it was stiffly unmoving. She greeted Georgiou with confident deference and took the seat and cup of tea Georgiou offered.
“It has come to my attention that, since the incident on Tonnata VII, you have not been entirely yourself.”
To her credit, Hasimova did not reply immediately. After a considered moment, she angled her head expressively and looked at Georgiou with widely sympathetic eyes. “It’s been hard since what happened.”
“Of course,” said Georgiou, entirely neutral. “It was a violent event you witnessed. More so because it was unexpected.”
“They were just, there one moment and the next...” Hasimova dabbed at her eye with her finger. “But I’m fine, captain, really. It’s simply the nature of life out here. Sometimes it surprises you in terrible ways.”
Georgiou sipped at her tea. “Terrible indeed. But death is unavoidable, you must be resilient when you encounter it. You never know when we will find ourselves in a position which requires us all to be at our best. Especially in this sector.”
The finger dropped away from Hasimova’s eye. “Yes, captain. I won’t let this affect me again.”
For all the trauma, Hasimova pivoted from distress to resolve admirably quick. “It is important as well that we take time to process and mourn. My ready room is available if you need to talk.”
“Thank you, captain. I’m promise, you won’t need to call me in again. I’ll make sure my work going forward is top notch.”
The assertiveness, the intensity. It hinted at an ambition within the younger woman. Georgiou’s lips pressed together in approval. Hasimova reminded her a lot of herself at that age. Did the young ensign have the same steel and the same hunger? Georgiou returned her teacup to the surface of the table. “I have always found martial arts to be a fine method of focusing one’s thoughts. Do you have experience in hand-to-hand combat?”
Hasimova seemed to instinctively shift forward to the edge of her seat, leaning towards Georgiou with eager interest. “Only the basics at the Academy.”
“Were you any good?”
“Promising,” said Hasimova with a faintly hapless shrug. “I would have liked to have done more.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I already had enough credits in Communications and I wanted to graduate. There was an opening on your ship.”
Georgiou’s finger traced the thin curve of the teacup’s handle. There was no mistaking the fact Hasimova was on the ship because Georgiou was in command of it and this fit well with the reason Georgiou had assigned Hasimova to the bridge.
Taking the silence as invitation, Hasimova ventured, “If you have any suggestions as to martial arts I could use to supplement my workout routine, I’d love to hear them. Not that I want any special treatment, captain. It’s enough that I get to be on the bridge. I know how lucky I am.”
Index finger curling around the handle, Georgiou lifted the teacup to her lips with another smile. “Nonsense. It is my honor to mentor young officers in Starfleet. Exceptional potential deserves exceptional recognition.”
The loose pants and top of the basic white practice uniform did far less to display Hasimova’s assets than the snug lines of a Starfleet uniform, but as Georgiou observed the ensign’s inexpert attempts to replicate the basic forms of wushu, she was pleased by the potential on display. “It will take many years, but you may yet have the makings of a fine martial artist. If you keep with it and practice daily.”
They were in Georgiou’s private gym, a small room with an exercise mat and palm fronds decorating the back wall for a touch of subtle tropical nostalgia. Hasimova’s work had entirely returned to form the past few days, meriting the minor reward of a private review to ensure Hasimova’s initial forays into martial arts were proceeding soundly. Far be it for Georgiou to let a beginner under her general guidance develop bad habits in the absence of competent oversight.
The doors swooshed and T’Vora entered. Her textured, slate grey Vulcan outfit was more form-fitting than the humans’ attire, but the design and function were similar. “Captain, ensign,” she greeted. Hasimova straightened to attention.
“I thought it would be worth showing you what these skills can do at a high level of expertise.”
Hasimova bowed her head stiffly and backed off the mat. T’Vora took a moment to stretch with some Sha’mura exercises then stood ready for Georgiou’s approach.
The demonstration that followed was slow enough to follow, but brutally forceful. Georgiou drew herself straight up, locked eyes with T’Vora, and launched into a quick forward jab. T’Vora only barely avoided the full force of it, shifting her torso just enough for the jab to slide past her waist and responding by bringing her own arm down, attempting to lock it around Georgiou’s, but Georgiou was expecting the counter and pivoted in a twist designed to turn T’Vora’s locking motion against her. A leg sweep followed that, while it did not connect, forced T’Vora to give up the advantage of her balanced stance and enabled Georgiou’s responsive arm-lock to fully engage.
The grapple lasted only a moment. Georgiou flipped T’Vora over her shoulder and onto the mat. T’Vora landed with a graceful roll and was instantly back on her feet, as smoothly if she had never hit the ground. She came at Georgiou with a leg sweep that succeeded in throwing the captain onto her back, but Georgiou rolled away before a second attack could land and kipped-up into a ready position again.
T’Vora began the second salvo, pushing close to Georgiou in a rapid exchange of jabs and punches almost balletic in pattern. The quick succession of perfectly matched strikes was a masterclass in physical strategy. The two combatants struck and countered with speed and precision, the muffled smacks of contact through their clothes like an uneven staccato of sharp applause. Neither took the clear upper hand—though attempts were made on both sides to sneak in attacks that might tip the balance—and after a minute both withdrew to a short distance to reset.
In the third clash, they kept more distance, circling with a focused intensity that momentarily rendered the ensign in the room functionally nonexistent. Georgiou’s gaze was dark and unblinking, T’Vora’s almost reptilian in its calm. When they launched at once another, Hasimova flinched in surprise, totally unable to predict their attacks and timing. All she could do was watch in awe as Georgiou kicked and T’Vora blocked and ducked under a punch, her own punch going wide. Georgiou danced away with a sharp spin that made her sleeves ripple and snap in the air.
Georgiou seemed to turn on a pinpoint so small she might have been one of a thousand dancing angels. Her retreat transformed into an attack: a ferocious left kick slammed across T’Vora’s torso and staggered her. Giving no sign as to the pain she must be experiencing, T’Vora attempted to hook Georgiou’s leg with her arm, but Georgiou flexed out of reach. T’Vora wove beneath Georgiou’s leg and came up on the other side with a backhand fist that struck Georgiou in the shoulder. Not being a Vulcan trained to hide all semblance of emotion, Georgiou winced and air hissed through her teeth.
Undaunted, Georgiou used T’Vora’s proximity to her advantage, finally executing the long-threatened leg sweep, but it was like no leg sweep Hasimova had ever seen. Without even fully bringing her left leg down, Georgiou leapt up, her right leg hooking T’Vora and propelling both of them into the air in a spin. The impact of Georgiou’s leg into T’Vora’s body transferred all the upward force into the Vulcan, pushing Georgiou back down towards the mat as T’Vora continued her ascent. Georgiou landed easily on her back. T’Vora had to bring her hands up to avoid landing on her head and went sprawling. For all it seemed ungraceful, the fall was reflexively adroit. A single muscle out of place and T’Vora could have broken her neck.
Hasimova was oblivious to the danger. To her, it seemed simply a wonderful display of strength, skill, and tactics. She lightly clapped her hands.
T’Vora and Georgiou rose from the mat. T’Vora pressed a fist into her palm and bowed to Georgiou. Georgiou mirrored the action and turned to Hasimova. The applause had already faded into memory, but even at its peak, the sound had completely failed to convey the immense respect and wonder in Hasimova’s eyes. She was thoroughly awed. Georgiou said warmly, “There is as much potential in your body as there is in an entire starship. More, because a starship cannot do more than it was built to do, whereas you have the ability to shape yourself in any way you choose.” Hasimova only nodded, still overwhelmed. “Continue with your practice, and when we have time, we will check the progress of your forms. Remember, foundational knowledge is the key to mastery.”
“Yes, captain.” Hasimova copied the fist and palm bow and left.
Absent the ensign, Georgiou hastily chided T’Vora, “You did not need to make it so easy.”
T’Vora stared unflinchingly. “If you wished to make an impression on the ensign, then it would seem to have served its point.”
Out in the hall, Hasimova smiled to herself. Being called into the ready room as a result of poor performance could have gone any number of ways, but by God’s own grace, the encounter had turned into an entirely advantageous opportunity, and Georgiou was none the wiser as to the real reason behind the dip and recovery in performance.
When Saru saw Paxton again, it was in the usual place: the mess hall as Paxton’s breakfast crossed with Saru’s lunch. Today, though, there was no oatmeal. Paxton was sitting at a table along the wall by the door, bent over a padd, intently reading something.
Saru took his lunch—a salad of kale, parsley, and beets—and was intending to conduct a circuit of the ship’s corridors as he ate when he noticed Paxton furtively dab his sleeve against his eyes and then wipe it across the padd in front of him.
“Lieutenant?”
Paxton looked up, his eyes as salty as Saru’s preferred food flavoring. “Oh, hi, Saru.”
Saru wondered what to make of this latest disparity between emotion and tone. “I do not wish to pry, but perhaps you should speak to Dr. Channick regarding your recent loss. She is an excellent resource for crew welfare.”
Paxton blinked. “It’s not... I mean, yeah, it is about that, but it isn’t. It’s...” He looked down at the padd, momentarily lost for words, then offered it up to Saru.
It was a letter. Glancing at the first few sentences, Saru could tell the source of the letter was Evelyn Tackett. She was thanking Paxton for attending the memorial, though from the details she provided, it seemed Paxton had elected not to fully participate in the service. Despite this, she was grateful for the time they had spent talking afterwards. “This seems personal.”
“Isn’t it the most beautiful letter you’ve ever read?”
Saru scanned a little further. Nestled in the third paragraph was an assurance Ensign Tackett would never have abandoned Paxton as a friend, and since he was dead, she intended to continue contacting Paxton in his stead. No temporal science required.
More interestingly, in the next paragraph, she asked three questions: why did Paxton not initiate contact when people were removed from proximity, what would he conclude from the lack of contact if he were in their position, and what question would he ask someone on the other side of the situation if he could be assured of an answer of complete honesty? The letter ended a two lines after with a promise that Paxton need not answer anything or reply and she would continue to write him, and the valediction “Enduringly Yours, Evie.”
Saru immediately grokked Evelyn’s meaning: it took two sides of zero contact to break a connection. He also saw the flaw in her logic. It did take two sides, but the fact was no one on the other side had ever made any effort to remain in contact with Saru. Either everyone was too shy to reach out or, more likely, the true impetus to do so was far rarer than Evelyn suggested. Proximity still potentially won out.
“It is... nice,” Saru concluded, the words an exercise in forced politeness. He returned the padd. “Are you not eating today?”
A quick look at the nearest time display confirmed the end of the hour was approaching. Paxton’s eyes went wide. He jumped up and ran off to procure some oatmeal before his shift started, providing Saru the perfect opportunity to exit the mess hall and eat his lunch in peace.
When Saru’s shift ended four hours later—an uneventful one, mostly spent surveying an asteroid field—he found himself thinking about Evelyn’s letter. As dismissive as he had been in the moment, it did potentially merit investigation. A small scientific experiment.
Problem was, he had no idea how to reach his intended subject. There seemed to be no active listing for her on the Federation registry. On a hunch, he called Risa.
The man who answered would have been deemed alluringly attractive by most species in the quadrant, but Risians, like humans, had a bit more hair than Saru found appealing. His greeting was the standard “warm welcomes” line that practically served as a planetary motto. “Forgive me for the imposition, but a friend of mine was traveling to Risa and I was wondering if she had arrived and might still be present.”
“Certainly, it’s no trouble at all, I’m happy to help. Name and species?”
“Lalana. Her species is called lului.”
The man paled. “Could you please hold a moment?”
“Certainly,” said Saru, far more calmly than he felt because something was clearly not right.
A minute later, a new face appeared—one Georgiou would have recognized, though the woman was not presently wearing the low-cut top that had left such an impression on the captain and everyone else in the ready room. She was dressed in a floral print robe and the waves of hair that normally fall around her shoulders were twisted into a set of rollers on her head. “Hello—” She froze, a glimmer of realization overtaking the worry in her eyes. “You must be Saru.”
Tendrils of ganglia wriggled out into view. “Yes, I am Lieutenant Saru, of the Federation starship Shenzhou. Who are you?”
A twist of ugliness marred the woman’s otherwise perfect features as the worry returned and spread without reserve across her face. “My name’s Sollis.”
“I am attempting to reach Lalana.”
The next two words were a full confirmation of Saru’s rising fears—fears Sollis seemed to share:
A/N: Sometimes the missions you don’t go on are as important as the ones you do.
<< Ch. 5 - Laugh It Off
Ch. 7 - If You Never Ask >>
Ensign Zahra Hasimova shook like a leaf. There were pieces of security officer on her face. There were pieces of security officer on her face.
It was supposed to be a simple historical survey, cataloguing some cave paintings left by a primitive species, a few hours of fresh air and sunshine and then back to the confines of the ship. The creators of the cave paintings had gone extinct several thousand years ago. From what, they did not know, but Hasimova suspected the answer to that question was directly related to the bits of security officer on her face.
Now it made sense, Saru’s ganglia.
“Could be anything,” said Dr. Channick, scanning the valley with her eyes more than her tricorder. “Viral contagion, supervolcano blocked out the sun, their choice of building material.”
Channick, Hasimova, and a security officer were standing on a rocky outcropping partway up a cliffside near the end of a ravine. A picturesque valley of trees and fields stretched out in front of them, seemingly untouched by industry or society.
The truth was hidden in plain sight. The rock in this region—and across much of the planet—featured abundant veins of cinnabar, a striking red mineral classically used on Earth to produce the color vermilion.
Cinnabar was also notable for another reason: it was as deadly as it was beautiful, with high concentrations of mercury. The locals, oblivious to the risks, had used the material extensively in their architecture, creating towns that, in their heyday, must have been startling gems of red jutting up from the landscape. A few thousand years of sedimentary deposits later and the only signs left of these structures were areas of unusually poor plant growth, like the treeless void of grass in the valley below. The locals were long gone but the poison remained.
“Maybe they had a limited diet and starved when there was a blight,” continued Channick. Offering medical theories as to the fate of the natives was her flimsy justification for getting off the ship and enjoying the scenery.
The security officer waited for them to finish taking in the view and offered Hasimova a hand down. She smiled in thanks and he smiled back.
They picked their way along the wall of the ravine, deposits of gravel crunching beneath their feet. A broad smear of silty mud ran through the ravine’s center, suggesting that when it rained, the whole area became a river of significant depth and danger, with rapids and undercurrents capable of dragging a person under and slamming them into the rocky walls with enough force to pulverize. At present, the greatest danger was to their uniforms. The security officer’s shoes and pants were already caked up to the knees from some earlier muddy crossing. Channick and Hasimova had beamed down onto the same side of the ravine as the cave and were spared the need to repeat this indignity.
The cave was a gaping maw in the wall. It had likely formed as the result of an eddy forcing enough water against one spot to form a depression in the rock. After a millennia of repeated flooding, the depression had grown into a pocket, then a cavity, and finally a wide, open chamber with broadly sloping walls, its apex a good twenty feet above their heads. It possessed the slight chill and faintly clammy smell of a place that knew no sun.
A second security officer greeted them from inside, their escort’s partner. “Take a look,” she said, shining a light up onto the ceiling.
The paintings were high along the ceiling and walls. Strange humanoid figures, gesturing as if in welcome, or perhaps warning, because a wave was not a universal hello. The figures highest up were full-body while the ones further down were cut off at waists and knees, the pigment on the lower half of the walls long since washed away.
There were abstract markings, too. Spirals and burst shapes, a pattern of diamonds perhaps intended as constellations. Hasimova imaged them and made a note to compare the patterns against stars visible in the planet’s night sky.
“Pax is gonna be so jealous,” said the male security officer. Hasimova smiled to herself. She might have suggested Paxton accompany them, but his shift had not yet started and she wanted to be the one to index the paintings. Being assigned to the bridge as an ensign was an amazing opportunity she intended to make the most of. When these images went back to Starfleet’s archives, her name would be listed on the files and her analyses would be the initial launching point for further investigation.
“There’s one in every crew,” Channick remarked under her breath. Hasimova looked over at the security officers. The female officer was eating a protein bar. She offered her partner half and he predictably declined. The current generation of Starfleet-issue protein rations was infamous for its unpalatable flavor profile and equally long shelf life. Many people thought a willingness to eat the bars increased your chances of away team duty. Even this was insufficient incentive to convince most officers to eat the rations outside of anything but the most dire of survival situations. A friend of Hasimova’s had eaten one on a dare and declared it “pure poison.”
“I’m gonna go do some more scans,” said Channick, which was probably code for going hiking. “Try not to fall on a rock or have a medical emergency.”
“Just pictures,” promised Hasimova.
The female officer volunteered to accompany Channick. The doctor declined the company and repeated her warning not to cause any medical emergencies.
“You be careful,” said the woman. “Watch out for the Jabberwock.”
“If I find any lifeform bigger than a rabbit, it’ll be a miracle.”
“Yeah, this planet is pretty dead,” noted the male officer.
“Saru didn’t come down. You should’ve seen his ganglia.”
There had been, prior to the initial beam-down, an incident. Standing in the transporter room, moments away from mission commencement, a ganglia reaction had frozen the Kelpien in place. This was not the first time it had happened, either. Three previous incidents of varying severity had necessitated replacing Saru on the away team roster at the last moment. Today marked the fourth.
Channick was entirely dismissive of the suggestion. “He thinks every planet is dangerous. It’s an evolutionary reaction to stress, it doesn’t mean anything.” A reaction sometimes strong enough to merit a medical exception, but Channick’s data had yet to reveal a conclusive correlation between the ganglia and mission outcomes. Most missions entailed some level of danger and occasionally the danger was fatal to someone. Saru’s ganglia in no way guaranteed a fatal outcome. She intended to talk to him about the issue this afternoon because enough was enough.
“Still,” said the woman. “Keeps your comms open.” Channick feigned a salute and exited.
Hasimova continued her imaging. It wasn’t enough to just get the pictures, she also took detailed material scans. The redder pigments contained cinnabar, of course.
The male officer wandered over to join Hasimova. “Do you think they looked like us?”
“Humanoid, at least, Beyond that, I can’t say.” The paintings were too crude to have any discerning features.
“Stop bothering her, Hack,” called the women.
“I’m not! Am I?”
Hasimova smiled. Hack had a thick head of dark brown hair, bright brown eyes, and a square jawline. “No.”
“See? We’re just having a conversation.” His partner rolled her eyes and went to stand guard nearer the entrance. “You’ll have to forgive Geri. They don’t train us security officers in manners. They think it’ll interfere with our ability to fight off threats.”
“Oh? So what do they train you to do?” asked Hasimova coyly. None of Hack’s subsequent boasts had anything to do with Starfleet training programs.
He was outlining an escapade involving drinking most of the available alcohol in a small Icelandic town when there was a thud from the cave entrance. Geri was on the ground, already in the process of trying to get back up. Hack rushed to her side.
“I just... had a sudden wave of vertigo,” said Geri.
“I’m on my way back,” said Channick over the comms.
“I think I’m okay.”
“Probably that protein bar you ate,” suggested Hack.
“Probably,” said Geri, sounding unconvinced.
“I told you not to eat—”
Something pulsed across the surface of Hack’s skin, like a wave of subdermal fire. He started to fall.
He did not hit the ground. His skin seemed almost to glow and then suddenly there was a wet, sucking sound as the surface of his body exploded in a spray of fat and muscle and every other element of soft tissue, the force sufficient to shred his uniform. Most of him landed on the ground, but enough of him landed on Hasimova and Geri that calling the spread of slime and cloth at their feet a human corpse was not accurate in the slightest.
Hasimova stood there, shock-still, her mouth open, feeling the dribble of viscous fluids down the side of her face.
“Doctor!” shouted Geri. “He exploded!”
A moment later, so did she, with the same pulsing ripple of energy across her skin.
Hasimova did not close her mouth fast enough. All the many words of her communications training failed her. Over the comms, all Channick could hear was her screaming.
“A parasite,” concluded Channick back in the relative safety of sickbay. “In the mud of the streambed. It was underground, so it didn’t show up on surface scans. Wouldn’t normally be a problem, but...”
Geri and Hack’s legs had been coated in mud from crossing the ravine. Hidden within the silty particles were hundreds of desperately hungry microscopic parasites. Exposure to a new food source switched them from a dormant state to one of rapid reproduction. Coupled with the human immune system’s failure to identify the parasites as a form of invasive tissue, the parasites had been able to lay millions of eggs in their new hosts. The human circulation system did the rest, spreading the eggs across every corner of the human body.
This situation was not intrinsically fatal. It turned out the parasites were easily filtered out by the transporter’s protocols once identified, but the security officers had been down on the planet for a few hours, enough time for the things to reproduce en masse. Then, when the density of eggs was at a critical mass, an enzymatic reaction caused all the eggs to hatch at once.
“Is this what wiped out the native population?” asked Georgiou.
“Maybe. Chances are the natives weren’t affected by them the way we are. The DNA of the parasites has an... explosive reaction to human DNA.” Even if there had never been any pieces of security officer on Dr. Channick, the sight of Hasimova standing there covered in splatters from both was not easily forgotten.
“It is unfortunate you were not there,” said Georgiou.
Channick bit her lip. The reaction had been so immediate, her presence would not have made any difference whatsoever. The real misfortune was that Channick had been playing archaeologist and scanning the geology of the area with her tricorder rather than the officers.
“I will have to put this on your record.”
“I understand, captain.”
Georgiou considered her chief medical officer. None of them had identified the danger in time to avert this disaster except perhaps Saru. “Perhaps we should put more stock into Saru’s ganglia.”
“Yes, captain,” said Channick.
“Do not worry. You have an exemplary service record. That this mistake has cost the lives of two of my crew is a tragedy, one that we will prevent in future. It will not end your career.”
With that, Georgiou left Channick to mull things over. Channick was having a hard time deciding what felt more insulting to her, the suggestion she cared about her career in the wake of this or the idea that it could have been predicted by Saru.
The correlation to Saru’s ganglia remained unclear. Yes, Saru’s reaction prior to the mission had been extreme enough to excuse him from beaming down on a seemingly routine task and two people had subsequently died, but on a hunch, Channick tested the parasite’s DNA on a sample of Kelpien DNA. It was entirely nonreactive. Whatever danger Saru had been sensing, it had not been danger to himself.
Inconclusive, she decided. And tragic.
There remained a question as to the parasite. The nearest computer terminal was blinking with a prompt inviting her to name the newly-discovered species for the report. There was no way she was going to name it after herself. The victims deserved a memorial, but there was something macabre in the idea of naming something for the first people it killed, and also the question of which officer to name it after. Ensign Harold Tackett had died first, but Lieutenant Geraldine Combs was higher-ranking and had a longer service record. Channick pressed a finger to record a prompt response but remained indecisive. “Com-Tack’s parasite?”
This was how the seventh planet of the Tonnata system came to be mistakenly labeled as “Comtax” for the next six months until someone in stellar cartography corrected it, and the parasite was labeled as “Comtaxan” in an even smaller error that never was.
It was normal for Saru to feel like all eyes on the ship were upon him, but today there seemed to be evidence to support this. Furtive glances, hushed whispers, and he could easily imagine what they were saying. He knew they were going to die.
If only he had. He knew something was wrong before the away team left the ship, but as with so many other times his ganglia reacted, he did not know why until after the tragedy. His ability lacked any clear prescience. Always there was an edge of uncertainty.
Despite this, Georgiou had taken him aside at the beginning of his shift to inform him that from now on, he should keep her appraised of his gangliar reactions. “You are a more potent force than I realized,” she said, and he thanked her and swallowed the fact he was more embarrassed by his ganglia than anything else. Captain Georgiou would never flinch in the face of death the way he did. Perhaps, he told himself, he could take solace in the fact his affliction could be of use to the captain. The idea was mildly reassuring.
His ganglia were not being particularly reassuring right now. The sensation of being watched was uncomfortable enough his only intention on his mid-shift meal break was to secure a serving of blueberries and retreat to a quieter place to eat them. He stood waiting in line for his turn at the food dispenser, his gaze stalwartly on the floor.
“You sick freak!” screamed Hasimova from the far side of the room, accompanied by the rough bray of a chair scraping across the floor. Saru’s head jerked up.
Hasimova was standing next to a seated Paxton, two trays of food on the table. Hers contained three-quarters of a sandwich and his a bowl of oatmeal. Hasimova’s hand jerked with uncertainty. Then she grabbed the bowl of oatmeal, upended it into Paxton’s face, and stormed out.
On the far side of the mess hall, a lieutenant commander from Paxton’s shift slowly clapped. Ignoring the derision, Paxton wiped oatmeal from his face and flicked the clumps onto his tray. Most of the congealed mass of food had landed in his lap by way of his chest. He did what he could to remove it. Another lieutenant at the next table offered him her napkin in pity.
Wiping down the chair, Paxton picked up both of the food trays and brought them to the service area. Then he came and stood behind Saru in line.
“Lieutenant,” said Saru uncertainly.
“Lieutenant Saru,” said Paxton, disarmingly neutral.
“Is everything alright?”
“Um,” said Paxton, squinting. “Are you asking because you want to know or are you just being polite?”
The answer was that Saru was being polite, but to say as much would ruin the intent. Saru sidestepped the question. “Ensign Hasimova seemed to be in distress.”
“I did get that impression.” It could have been a joke, but Paxton’s expression was grimly intent.
Saru reached the front of the line. He placed his order with the computer. A moment later, Paxton did the same at the adjacent dispenser when it became available. “Oatmeal. Bananas and cinnamon.” Their orders appeared at the same time and they both started towards the main entrance, awkwardly halting as they realized their destination was the same. Saru motioned for Paxton to go first.
This was all the encouragement Paxton needed to initiate a conversation. “Was it bad that I threw away Zahra’s sandwich? I didn’t think it was right to leave it there on the table. But maybe she’ll come back for it.”
Somehow, Saru doubted Hasimova was going to return to the mess hall anytime soon. “I do not think it matters. There is no shortage of... sandwiches.”
“Good point. I wonder how long I have to wait until I can apologize.” Paxton began to eat his oatmeal as he walked.
“That would depend on what you need to apologize for.”
“I asked her what it looked like when Hack died.”
Saru maintained his stride despite the somersault his mind took. “Why would you ask that?”
“That’s...” Paxton’s brow furrowed. “If I could see what it looked like, then it would be like I was there.”
Saru slowed to a stop. “I almost went on the mission.” He reached a hand up towards his head, fingers hovering inches away from his ganglia slits.
“Why didn’t you?” It seemed like Paxton was the only person on this ship who did not know.
“I sensed death.”
“Oh.”
They stood there, uncomfortably still and silent until Saru asked, “Why would you wish to see death?”
Paxton shoveled a spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth and gulped it down, “It’s not that I want to see death, it’s that I wish I could’ve been there with Hack. He’s my friend. If I can picture it in my imagination, then at least in some part of my brain, I was there.”
Humans were really alien, Saru decided. He knew firsthand the visuals of his kin being butchered as food and that was something he would rather not have seen. He resumed walking and Paxton followed his lead. “The reality of the situation would likely not be the comfort you imagine.”
“Maybe. But not knowing is worse.” They arrived at the aft turbolifts and waited. “I was thinking of asking the captain if I could go to the memorial service.”
“I am sure she would allow it.”
“He has a sister, Evelyn.”
There was nothing really to say to this statement of fact. Saru offered the vaguest of platitudes. “I am sorry for your loss.” The turbolift arrived. A crewman stepped off. Saru and Paxton stepped on. “Deck five.” Paxton said nothing; his quarters were on the same level.
It was a short ride. Not short enough—the sense of shared confinement drove Paxton to resume talking as Saru tentatively ate a blueberry.
“He was my best friend. I wasn’t his, but he was the best one I had.” The lift doors opened.
“Perhaps you should speak to someone,” advised Saru, exiting the turbolift with a single graceful stride.
Paxton did not move immediately. “I’m sorry. I’m being weird and bothering you and you don’t even know me. Sorry.”
Saru stood outside the turbolift, staring at Paxton, trying to contextualize this behavior. It was very different to the reactions Morita and Yoon had displayed over the death of a man, by Morita’s own admission, they barely knew. It was also markedly different from Paxton’s confident exuberance a week ago when he had assailed Saru on the subject of the lului language. There was something tragic in the loss of that innocence. “You are... not bothering me.” It was an awkwardly difficult statement to make, since it was untrue.
Paxton exited the lift then, gaze downcast. The door closed behind him and the turbolift hummed off to its next destination. “It’s fine, I know I’m annoying. The common denominator in my lack of friendships is me.” Despite the body language, his voice was entirely unsentimental, verging on introspectively curious. “My reactions are a little... off. Eventually the novelty of my weirdness wears off and people realize they’d rather hang around with someone who falls within ‘acceptable social parameters.’” He used the hand with the spoon in it to mime half a set of air quotes. “And then they disappear. I wonder if Hack...” He fell silent. Contemplating whether or not the sole person he still labeled a friend would have ceased being his friend if only he had lived long enough was an immensely depressing train of thought.
Saru looked at the bowl of berries. “I believe you are describing the normal rise and fall of social relationships. Friendships are largely based on proximity. A change in shift, posting, or interests, and it becomes very difficult for either party to maintain the requisite interactions to continue as ‘friends.’”
Paxton looked up. “Really? It’s not just me?”
The rigid lines of Saru’s face seemed to soften slightly. “Entirely not.”
Encouraged, Paxton set off down the hall and Saru did the same, catching up to the much shorter human in all of two steps. Despite the improvement in Paxton’s demeanor, his conversational bent remained bleak. “It doesn’t change the fact everyone leaves in the end. It’s inevitable. You can’t fight the future.”
Saru tilted his head. “The future is not yet determined.”
“Isn’t it, though? The present is the culmination—the logical conclusion of all the events of the past. Our decisions are based on our experiences, so given the same history prior to this moment, we will always choose to do exactly what we do, the way we do it.”
Lalana had said something similar to Morita and Yoon. Events are a cumulative result of all events which came before them. Paxton’s interpretation of the sentiment was a little more extreme.
It was an extreme Saru had encountered before, in a science course at the Academy. He had not been brave enough to voice his own opinion at the time, but in the years that followed, he had developed a response and was now prepared to present it. “Determinism is a philosophy which fails to anticipate the unpredictability of quantum mechanics. If the atomic reactions which govern the firing of neurons are random, then it is possible for a multitude of outcomes even given identical circumstances.”
Though Paxton had not been in the class with Saru, he had also had this discussion before and jumped right to a counterargument also mentioned in Saru’s course. “Assuming the randomness of quantum reactions is sufficient to overpower the psycho-neurological programming on the macro level.”
“An unresolved question of scale,” allowed Saru. “If I may, there is a relevant analogy on the macro scale. If we were merely a product of our genetic programming, then I would not be on a starship. I believe in free will, Lieutenant Paxton.”
“So people have a choice and choose to tell me I’m a freak?” Saru had not foreseen this consequence of his assertion. He was at a loss as to how to respond. Paxton stopped in front of one of the dozens of doors along the corridor. “This is me.”
Saru said the only thing he could think of in reassurance. “Ensign Hasimova was in distress. I am certain she did not intend to refer to you unkindly.”
“It’s okay. It isn’t the first time someone’s called me a freak or a robot and it won’t be the last. Water off a duck’s back, right?” This time, the words were resilient, but the tone verged on upset. Paxton’s emotional state was consistently opposite the content of his remarks. “I’m gonna change. Thanks for walking with me, lieutenant.”
“We were going in the same direction,” said Saru, downplaying the charity. He was unsure what the idiom about the duck meant and had no interest in learning the particulars.
“Then I guess it’s a friendship of proximity. Beep boop!”
Saru stared.
“Sorry,” said Paxton, smiling weakly. “Robot humor. See you later.”
“Lieutenant—”
Paxton froze with his hand on the door controls.
“It would be advisable to attempt an apology to Ensign Hasimova tomorrow. You should never leave an apology too long.”
“Okay. I’ll do that.”
The door closed. Saru stood alone in the hallway, wondering at the whole conversation. Even if Paxton failed to meet the definition of proximal friend rather than mere acquaintance, Saru hoped his words had provided some consolation to the other lieutenant. He hated the thought of anyone around him suffering as a result of a misunderstanding. He set off towards his own quarters to finish the rest of his break in peace.
There was another possibility. Perhaps most people did form enduring social bonds and Saru was as odd a duck as Paxton because neither of them had much in the way of long-term friendships.
Maybe it was for the best. Deep space exploration was a high-risk undertaking and having friends meant potentially losing them in a very permanent sense.
In light of Georgiou’s newfound admiration for Saru’s ganglia, Channick debated the merits of calling the Kelpien in, but at the end of the day she was the ship’s chief medical officer and she had her own conscience to answer to. “Lieutenant Saru to the medbay.”
Saru arrived with wringing hands and worry written across every inch of his posture. “Dr. Channick, is there something wrong? My latest medical scan, I thought there might be an abnormality—”
Channick held her hand up for silence. “Your scan was fine. That isn’t why I called you in. Lieutenant, I need you to hear something, and I need you to really take it in, understand?”
Saru’s head jerked in alarmed confusion. It sounded like he was in trouble.
“Your ganglia. You had a bad reaction before this last mission and didn’t go down, and I signed off on that. The mission turned out to be dangerous, yes, but every mission is potentially dangerous. Every moment in time is potentially dangerous. I want to make one point here, and that is what would have happened if you had gone down to the planet.”
Saru recalled Lalana saying something similar during the battle with the pirates. There is nowhere in the universe which is safe. He found himself thinking of the lului regularly, wondering where she was in the universe and what she was doing, but far be it for him to bother her.
Channick picked up a biological sample dish. It contained a quantity of dirt. She opened it. “Put your hand in this.”
Saru tentatively complied. It was just dirt.
“This dish contains the parasites that killed Lieutenant Combs and Ensign Tackett.”
Saru’s hand jerked back. His whole body pulled away, his limbs tensing as he fought the urge to leap blindly backwards. Only one thing kept him in place. For all that he knew he should be afraid, nothing in his instincts had alerted him to danger.
Channick closed the dish. “No ganglia, right? Because this parasite isn’t dangerous to you. Just the people around you, provided we fail to take precautions.” She pulled the medical gloves from her hands and dropped them into the nearest receptacle.
The tension abated. “The danger I sensed, the coming of death... It was not my own.” It wasn’t always. Saru’s ganglia were perfectly capable of reacting on behalf of others, as they clearly had in this instance. “Perhaps if I had stopped them from going down to the planet...”
Channick took a deep breath. This was not the point she was trying to get across to him. “Saru. You are the most cautious and thorough science officer on the whole ship. When most people would logically stop looking for something, you keep checking. That’s why I know, if you had been down on that planet, you would have found the parasite.” She imagined Saru would have checked under every stone, leaf, and twig and still balked at the idea of issuing an all-clear.
Realization seized Saru. He clasped his hands and straightened to his full height. That made it even worse. There were two ways he might have prevented their deaths. “I am... more responsible than I realized.”
“No, don’t go there. The responsibility is mine. I should have had this damn conversation with you weeks ago. I’m your doctor and I could have run my own scans down on the planet. None of this is on you. Besides, we can’t change what happened.”
Channick seemed to be taking all the blame on herself. Saru knew what Lalana would have said on the subject, that no one person was more responsible for any given outcome than another, but it seemed to him that of the thousand, tiny million interactions that had led to the deaths on Tonnata VII, more than a few of them belonged to him and Dr. Channick, and Saru’s rejection of Paxton’s determinist philosophy further meant the two of them could have changed things if only the past were changeable.
Saru folded his fingers gracefully together. The past was over and done. “But we can change what happens going forward.”
There was something in the way Saru said it, an unusual certitude to his tone. Channick relaxed. Most of the crew had mixed feelings about their resident Kelpien and his many idiosyncrasies, but Channick knew there were several ways to define intelligence and her favorite was “the capacity to exceed evolutionary instinct.” For all his fears and struggles, Saru was a highly intelligent officer.
“Wash your hands,” she told him. “Those parasites will kill most anyone else here.”
The third planet orbiting Bepi 113 was a maelstrom of trionium gas and electrically charged particles. Drifting a safe distance away, the Shenzhou was witness to an impressive display as ribbons of plasma discharged across the atmosphere in a pattern not unlike the way the genetic incompatibility had danced beneath Ensign Tackett’s skin—a similarity known only to Ensign Hasimova, who repressed a shudder as she observed the phenomenon from her post on the bridge. Her nominal acceptance of Lieutenant Paxton’s apology had not extended to providing him the requested description.
There was no way to beam down through the atmosphere to investigate the anomalous readings coming from the planet’s surface. They would have to take a shuttle. As the away team donned EV suits and the engineers triple-checked the shuttle reinforcements, Saru could not repress the violent reaction of his ganglia.
The ensign beside him eyed the ganglia nervously, reminded of Tackett in an entirely different way. This felt like the prelude to Tonnata VII all over again.
It was hard to miss the staring. “Do not concern yourself, ensign,” said Saru.
“But...”
“If there is danger, then I will assist in handling it.”
The ensign relaxed. If Saru was willing to go down there, there was no reason for any of them to be worried.
There was plenty of reason, of course. The ensuing chaos of another mission gone dangerously awry entirely justified the appearance of the ganglia, but when the unstable electrical field produced a series of dangerous plasma waves that threatened to fry the shuttle and strand them on the surface or worse, Saru deflected the waves away from their position by polarizing the trionium gas around the shuttle, rendering it anathemic to the charged particles, and they all made it back to the ship in one piece.
<< Ch. 4 - The Certainty of Small Things
Ch. 6 - Fruit of the Poison Tree >>
Within half an hour, the situation on the Triton was stable enough for its crew and medical staff to return to their own ship. Saru bid Lieutenant Commander Morita and Lieutenant Yoon farewell, wishing them a speedy recovery and offering his condolences for their loss. They vanished in a shimmer of white as the transporter whisked them home.
“Amazing!” said Lalana at the sight. “I want to be transported!”
Saru did not have the heart to tell her that someone who failed to register to most sensors was unlikely to be able to undergo the process. Lalana’s physiology rendered all of the transporter’s many safety protocols inoperable. He instead pointed out a discoloration of brown along the surface of her tail.
“Some human cells are not very polite. They attacked me as a foreign entity. Yet I am the one accused of poor manners.” Her tongue clicked a few times as she sloughed off the seemingly dead cells onto the empty surface of the slab.
Saru felt a pang of regret that the issue of propriety continued to cause Lalana such audible distress, but there was one key point of difference between cellular and macro-level interactions. “It was inadvertent, an immune response. There was no malice consciously intended.”
“I think I would have preferred it be intended,” she countered as they left the medbay. “I don’t mind it, though. All outer cells stand ready to sacrifice themselves in protection of the whole. Much like members of your Starfleet stand ready to defend the Federation. It is like you are all a lului!” Thankfully, Saru and Paxton’s conversations had finally shifted Lalana’s opinion as to the virtues of the Federation.
“It is merely a question of scale,” said Saru, finding that a curiously satisfying analogy. “Starfleet is much like the immune system of the Federation.” They even engaged with “foreign entities” in the forms of new life and civilizations, though they took great pains not to treat these entities the way Morita’s immune system had treated Lalana.
The rest of the walk might have continued in contemplative silence, their long strides making quick work of the route, but there was another thing Saru had been wondering, a story he had been piecing together from his observations. “Crying is an expression of human distress not found in Dartarans. Yet you recognized it in Lieutenant Yoon, and you said you had been in proximity to human cells previously.”
“For having such small eyes, you have seen very well,” said Lalana, spinning her hands in contentment. “Yes, there was a human known to Margeh and T’rond’n, Peter Bhandary. He was upset, so I attempted to lallen with him, but human hair is not alive, so I was unable to liliann.”
“Liliann?”
“A sort of... sharing of signals that makes another feel better. It is how lului transmit information in proximity and ensure there is no miscommunication. It is not possible with humans because it requires lului cells to receive the signals.”
They were back at the guest quarters. Lalana went immediately to the windows, as if she were hoping to see some lingering trace of the recent battle. The asteroid base was not visible from this side of the ship and neither was the Triton. It was just an empty field of stars. Lalana stared out at them in rapt attention and said, “Because I cannot liliann with a human, this time I attempted to use words to compensate. I’m not sure how sufficient they were, but perhaps I spoke enough of them for my meaning to pass through the barrier of the outside and reach the consciousness within. Do you think it worked? Can you liliann with words?”
However many words Lalana spoke, they were never going to equal the sort of bond she was describing. Saru joined her at the window. “It is unfortunate, but you are unlikely to encounter that level of clarity in communication until we locate your people and return you to your homeworld. There is a level of understanding that can only be shared by members of the same species.”
Lalana turned from the window and locked her hands tightly together. “Is that true? I will never know full understanding again because I am the only one of my kind in Starfleet?”
Humans, Vulcans, Trill, Andorians, even Tellarites—all these were species of intelligent life Saru had served alongside in Starfleet. The sad fact was, none of them really understood what it meant to be a Kelpien. “And I am the only Kelpien in all of Starfleet. There are also things which can be understood by virtue of shared circumstance.”
Maybe none of the other species in Starfleet understood what it was to be Kelpien, but Lalana had stumbled onto one truth in her attempt to liliann with Yoon and Morita: members of Starfleet chose to be there. From the beginning of the day to its end, they were all of them united by that collective understanding and purpose.
The kinship Saru now shared with Lalana was considerably more depressing. “The only ones of our kind,” she mused, tilting her head downward and pressing her hands together tightly.
Saru tilted his head to the side in sympathy. “Good manners are a method by which all species may approach each other with minimal misunderstanding. When properly observed, they provide a shared foundation for communication.”
She looked up then, her tongue clicking again. “Oh, Saru! Really?” she said, and even if it was mostly the translator talking, Saru thought he could hear a note of gentle annoyance.
“Returning for a moment to the subject of the Civil Conversation...”
As she concluded her transmission to Starfleet Command, Philippa Georgiou took genuine satisfaction in having felled three birds with one stone. The battle with the pirates, while it had not begun in a manner anyone would have chosen, had more than adequately resolved the issue of piracy in the area by destroying the pirates’ base of operations and neutralizing their leadership. The heart of the threat had been eliminated and the Dartaran Council was pleased.
As for the escaped vessels, the Shenzhou was too busy assisting the Triton to chase them down. That meant it would be spared the general housekeeping remaining for the assignment, bird number two.
The Triton’s need for further repairs felled the third bird. “Georgiou to Saru,” she intoned, and was rewarded with the sight of his slender form on the ready room holocomm. This necessitated her craning her neck up slightly. “You are with our guest?”
“Yes, captain, completing the assignment as or—”
“Please escort Lalana to the shuttlebay.”
Saru drew back slightly, confused. “Captain?”
“The Triton will be taking her to Starbase 55.” The confusion did not abate. Georgiou gently asked, “Is there a problem?”
The next indication of distress was the way Saru’s hands touched together and twisted. He looked away in careful thought and Georgiou waited. After a moment longer than was ideal, Saru said, “The assignment you have given me, to instruct Lalana on manners, am I to continue this and accompany her?”
That was an interesting idea. Georgiou decided it was the perfect opportunity for a small test. “Do you feel it necessary? We are returning to our regular assignment. It may be some weeks until you can return to your duties if you do.”
The holocomms were not displaying Lalana, so Georgiou heard the lului’s voice without seeing her. “But we have not finished our conversation. We have barely begun.”
Georgiou watched Saru’s mouth vacillate faintly in a primordially fishlike reaction. It was excruciating sometimes, watching him process decisions. She patiently waited for the process to complete, half-expecting to see his threat ganglia emerge given the pain this exercise seemed to be causing him.
She did not see the ganglia, but neither did she receive a response that satisfied her. In the end, Saru said the one thing Georgiou had been hoping he would not.
The mess hall was abuzz with activity. Though lunch shifts varied across all conceivable hours, midday by the ship’s onboard clock was always a dining hot spot and Saru found himself surrounded by more hustle and bustle than he generally preferred. He stood in line, trying not to think too much about the proximity of the people in front of and behind him, and focused on his pending lunch order. A large, undressed salad. He did not normally eat so much in a single meal, preferring a series of light snacks that matched his species’ tendency to grab food in snatches when it was safe to do so, but the stress of recent days had finally culminated in a gnawing hunger.
He was debating returning to his quarters with the dish when he heard someone call his name. He turned to find an eager human face looking up at him with short, dark hair and the epicanthal fold he knew indicated Asian heritage. One of those subtle differentiators in human faces he had learned to identify since coming about the Shenzhou. It took him a moment to put the name with the face. “Lieutenant Paxton.”
The meal in Saru’s hands could have been lunch or dinner, but Paxton was clearly carrying breakfast: a bowl of oatmeal with sliced banana and cinnamon. Being on second shift, midday was his morning. “I was wondering if I could pick your mind about something? If you’re not busy.”
“I am on my lunch,” said Saru.
Paxton squinted. “So, not busy?”
“What can I assist you with?”
Taking this as invitation, Paxton moved towards a six-seater table with only two chairs occupied and Saru found himself drifting after. The pair of crewman already at the table paid them no attention. There turned out to be a padd hidden under Paxton’s tray. “I was wondering if you could look over some translations I was working on.”
“I am not a linguist,” warned Saru.
“I know, but you spent more time with Lalana than anyone.”
Paxton’s eager optimism moved Saru. “I will do what I can,” he said, looking through the padd. There turned out to be a great deal more content than Saru and Lalana had encountered in their discussions on biology and culture. A surprising amount of the new vocabulary involved botany, gardening, and cooking. “We did not discuss any of these topics.”
“No, this is stuff the Triton’s computer spat out after she left. Their comms officer sent it over. I can’t shake the feeling there’s something wrong with our translation matrix.”
“Wrong how? I found the matrix to be more than adequate.” Perhaps not initially, but after the first hurdle of the translations in sickbay, the matrix had grown by leaps and bounds and proven an entirely effective communication tool.
“Thank you. I barely slept the two days she was here. Honestly, I can’t put my finger on it, but take this word here, ilr. The computer has it as ‘known quantity’ but I think it’s more like ‘equivalent knowledge.’ That’s not a big deal, adjusting translation to fit context, but... I get the impression lului doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t change in context. And in a weird way, the words make less sense than they seem to on the surface.”
In light of the discussion about liliann, that seemed entirely apropos. Saru opened his mouth to say as much but wasn’t quick enough to stop Paxton from jumping onto an adjacent train of thought.
“I mean, when I finally figured out that lului have no genders? That entire initial conversation on the bridge made so much more sense. She wasn’t saying she was female, she was just saying she wasn’t male!” Paxton paused only to ingest a heaping spoonful of oatmeal.
Saru realized he had fundamentally misunderstood a few details of the scientific survey. They had, of course, covered lului reproduction, which Saru knew was asexual, but he had also asked if there were any phenotypical differences between male and female lului. Lalana had said there were not, and rather than ask a follow-up to what seemed a non-issue, Saru had continued down his question list. Her exact words were, “We are structurally identical,” which was a very confusing way of saying they were genderless. Suddenly the translation matrix seemed exactly as insufficient as Paxton was suggesting.
“We should cease referring to Lalana as female,” Saru suggested.
“I offered. She said she preferred it. Think about it. She’s been with Dartarans for six years. Not only is their language gendered, it’s intractably so. They have four words for ‘they’ and none of them are singular and the gender-neutral one only refers to objects. If you used it on an intelligent lifeform, it’d be considered an insult.” Paxton ate another mouthful of oatmeal, this time fully swallowing it before rambling on, “What’s really cool about lului is that they have temporal pronouns. Past, present, and future. It’s the pronouns, not the verbs. Because the action doesn’t change, the frame of reference of the person doing it does. How novel is that? Seriously, I wish I had more time to study her language.”
For the first time, Saru wondered if he should have taken Lalana up on her request to accompany her to the starbase and beyond. He had only grazed the surface of her experiences and knowledge during their brief time together. There were still so many questions, so many things he could have helped her with. Alas, it was not to be. Saru had to find consolation in the fact he had done as Georgiou wanted by staying on the Shenzhou.
Paxton broke the silence again. Communications officers did have a reputation for chattiness. “I’ve been wondering, as a non-human, what do you think about using a translator to render a laugh for a species that laughs in a completely different way?” He looked at Saru expectantly, waiting with spoon in hand for an answer.
It was an odd question. Saru rarely found anything in the universe to be funny. “Humor is highly subjective. It could be... problematic.”
“You’re right,” said Paxton, resuming his meal.
Saru wondered another thing. If Lalana could laugh, what would it sound like? Sadly, their individual forays into the cosmos were marked more by occasions for sorrow than humor.
Returning to the far reaches of space was a comfort to Captain Georgiou. Out here, with little to no oversight and potential mysteries hiding behind every orbiting rock, there was a freedom to do as she wished and an autonomy that assignments like clearing out pirates for Federation allies did not provide. She sat at the table in her ready room, sipping tea as she scrolled down a list of unexplored objects and shortlisted a few candidates for exploration.
The door chimed. It was T’Vora. The Vulcan stood at stiff attention, unnecessarily formal given their years serving together. Formality made T’Vora more comfortable than any display of camaraderie, no matter how genuine. Not that T’Vora would ever admit to it—if asked, T’Vora would calmly state that Vulcans did not experience emotional discomfort and call it a non-issue. Georgiou simply knew better.
“We have entered sector H-7,” T’Vora reported. They were so far out, the sector did not yet have a designated Federation name. If they discovered some developed sentient species, it would receive one.
Georgiou gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. “Join me,” she offered, flicking her finger at the empty chair beside her own. As captain, the offer was really a command. T’Vora paused at the dispenser to order a cup of hot water with cayenne pepper and sat down.
T’Vora went straight to business, as usual. “Have you chosen our target?”
“Not yet.” Another flick of the finger sent the list on the display two screens down. Georgiou shortlisted a planet whose atmosphere long-range scans suggested contained some form of sugar. “Have you chosen your ship?”
T’Vora was not just Georgiou’s first officer, she was also Starfleet’s next new captain. The promotion was already approved and the assignment was pending only this one final decision between two ships coming off the assembly line at almost the same time: the USS Edison and the USS Buran.
The ships were almost as different as night and day. The Edison was a Hoover-class science vessel and the Buran a Cardenas-class workhorse. Either ship promised adventure and prestige with an exceptional captain at its helm. The precise nature of those adventures would be determined by the function of the ship’s design.
“It is unfortunate that there are no pending ships named for Vulcan luminaries,” said T’Vora.
“I mentioned that to Starfleet Command,” said Georgiou. “They will look into it.” T’Vora’s eyebrow raised. “I did not say it came from you. I told them, as Vulcans have been in space longer than humanity and in light of the esteemed performance of my first officer, it seemed shameful there were no ships named for her people for her to command.”
“Thank you,” said T’Vora, because while it was true she found the dearth of ships named for Vulcans illogical, T’Vora had an interest in remaining in the Starfleet Command’s good graces. That meant keeping her criticism of their naming logic to herself. Since Georgiou hated having anyone looking over her shoulder and had no intention of joining the admiralty, she felt free to raise the objection on T’Vora’s behalf. T’Vora sipped her cayenne water. “In fact, I have made my decision and sent it to Starfleet Command. I have chosen the Edison.”
It was Georgiou’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “That is the less tactical assignment.”
“Though it was many years ago, I am a graduate of the Vulcan Science Academy.” It was easy to mistake the Vulcan’s stiff tone for haughty indignation. “My tactical expertise may prove a useful supplement to the scientists aboard, especially should we find ourselves in an unscientific situation.”
Georgiou smiled. “Very logical.”
“Indeed.”
“You should begin thinking what officers you wish to bring with you from the Shenzhou.”
“I have already constructed several lists of candidates. I will interview them and inform you as to my decisions in the coming months.”
Probably the interviews were even more formality and T’Vora already knew exactly who she wanted. Georgiou would miss that level of preparedness. “Some part of me wants to suggest you take Saru.”
“He displeased you during the incident with the lului.”
“Disappointed,” Georgiou corrected.
“I found his survey of the lului to be adequate for what it was.”
Georgiou put her cup down on the glossy surface of the table. “It was not the survey. That was an admirable attempt. It was what he did after, or more precisely, what he did not do.” She paused for emphasis. “He had an interest in the lului and I allowed him to pursue it. I went so far as to offer him an opportunity to go with her to the Triton. Lalana requested he go with her. Do you know what he said? He said he would do whatever I wanted. It would be one thing if he had committed to either course of action. He committed to neither.”
It could have been an angry condemnation of Saru’s greatest weakness as an officer, but T’Vora thought she detected regret in Georgiou’s tone more than anything else. “Have you informed him of this issue so that he can correct it?”
“I worry, if I do not approach him very carefully, he may take the criticism too far. He is very sensitive. Besides, he may learn to be more bold on his own.” Georgiou picked up her tea again.
“If you wish, his threat ganglia are an interesting diagnostic tool I could bring to the Edison.”
Georgiou smiled. “I am not ready to give up on him just yet. There is something to be said for a Kelpien overcoming its basest instincts to join Starfleet, and he did propose the course of action which enabled us to save Lalana in the first place. Saru may yet surprise us.”
“Surprise you,” said T’Vora. “There will be no ‘us’ in four months.”
“You could continue as my first officer until they name a ship for a Vulcan.” The dry look on T’Vora’s face felt even more unamused than usual. Georgiou shrugged. “I had to try.”
There was a pensive silence as they sipped their beverages. Finally, T’Vora said, “Philippa, I realize I have left something unsaid. You should know I place high value upon the time I have spent here with you as my captain.”
It verged on an admission of emotion. Georgiou’s dark eyes glinted with amusement. “Sentimentality from a Vulcan. They should give me a commendation.”
T’Vora raised an eyebrow, which was as close to a laugh as Georgiou was going to get.
With a course laid in for Starbase 55, the USS Shenzhou entered the final phase of its regular duty roster: the graveyard night shift. It was an eight-hour window for the majority of the crew to rest and would put the ship on target for arrival at the starbase first thing in the morning.
Neither objective was realized. At 0441, a call came in that only the Shenzhou could possibly hope to answer in time.
Georgiou awoke to an emergency comm from the graveyard shift chief, Commander Penning. “Captain, USS Triton has sent a distress signal. They’ve run into the pirates. ETA twelve minutes.” The Triton was an old workhorse of a ship, slated for decommission in less than six months, its captain on the cusp of retirement. It had been assigned to the same pirate search as the Shenzhou owing to the vastness of the territory in need of scouring.
“I’m on my way.” Thirty seconds later, the general call went out for all hands to battle stations.
T’Vora was already in the turbolift when Georgiou stepped inside. The doors opened onto the bridge and Penning immediately vacated the captain’s chair with an update: “Seven minutes.”
“Thank you, commander,” said Georgiou, smoothly settling into the chair as T’Vora took up a position behind the tactical console with a curt nod, indicating the Andorian currently stationed there, Lt. Cmdr. ch’Theloh, should maintain his station while she observed. Penning moved to take over the operations station from the junior officer stationed there.
“Four enemy combatants,” ch’Theloh reported. “One freighter, two Andorian strike craft, and a Tellarite cruiser. The asteroid is outfitted with both heavy phasers and torpedo launchers.” The Triton had done more than encounter the pirates—it had discovered their base of operations.
“Red alert,” ordered Georgiou. “Hail the Triton.”
The Triton’s captain, Chaudhuri, appeared as a flat image on the Shenzhou’s main viewscreen rather than a projection because unlike the Shenzhou, the Triton was not outfitted with a holocomm system. Chaudhuri had dark grey hair streaked nearly white along the temples and was currently shirtless, having been woken from slumber with such immediacy he had not had time to dress. He immediately launched into a terse status report. “Captain. We’ve lost our warp drive. Forward shields are compromised.”
There was a sputter of sparks behind Chaudhuri. “Aft torpedoes down!” shouted the man at the Triton’s tactical console.
“Evasive pattern Delta-6!” was Chaudhuri’s reply.
“Give me more speed,” Georgiou ordered. Someone down in engineering scrambled to divert as many power systems as could be spared to eke out enough of an increase to get them there twenty seconds sooner. Georgiou barely noticed; she was too busy prepping a battle plan and watching the movements of the enemy ships. “As soon as we drop out of warp, fire all phasers on the freighter. Disable its weapons, avoid drive systems. Torpedoes on the asteroid armaments on my mark. We must draw fire from the Triton. Second phaser target, the cruiser.”
“Aye, captain,” said ch’Theloh. Georgiou did not question why T’Vora was not on the station. She supposed her first officer thought the more well-rested Andorian would have sharper reaction times.
Their arrival at the battle was greeted by a salvo of phaser fire from the Tellarite cruiser and one of the smaller strike craft. The array of batteries affixed to the asteroid remained focused on the Triton, which was doing everything it could to avoid or direct all hits against it, gliding around in frantic spirals on impulse engines alone. Most of the asteroid’s batteries were weapons stripped off various spaceships. It made for a hodgepodge of colorful fire in almost every shade imaginable.
Ch’Theloh carried out Georgiou’s attack plans with quick competence, enabling Georgiou to direct the helm to bring them about between the Triton and the bulk of the asteroid’s attack. The freighter’s weapons went down under the focused force of the Shenzhou’s phasers. The freighter immediately turned about, heading for an escape vector. Georgiou let it go, more concerned with reducing the threat to the Triton.
The cruiser was a fiercer opponent. Heavily armored and shielded, it barely seemed to register the Shenzhou’s phasers.
Not that this mattered. The cruiser was a feint.
“Fire all torpedoes,” said Georgiou.
The force of the unified launch was so tremendous the command deck of the Shenzhou registered the tremor. An arc of glowing pellets shot out towards the asteroid in an absolutely beautiful formation: tight enough to be focused on a small target area, but not so tight as to be taken out by an individual countermeasure.
Two torpedoes went down in the asteroid base’s attempt to respond. The other six impacted against two batteries and triggered an explosion of yellow bursts like pustules of energy popping. The lights on the asteroid base flickered and died. A moment later, a larger, red-hued explosion erupted as the asteroid’s power reactor overloaded.
The Tellarite cruiser and the two strike craft responded to the loss of the base by breaking off their attacks and turning tail, each warping away in a different direction. The battle was won. Damage to the Shenzhou was minimal. Shield systems and some minor cosmetic damage to the hull plating.
“Can you take on wounded?” Chaudhuri asked.
“Certainly,” said Georgiou. “Sickbay, prepare to receive Triton wounded.”
When the alert sounded, Saru and Lalana were coincidentally in the middle of a conversation about Tellarites spurred by a line of questioning into whether all species were truly so invested in good manners. Saru had been forced to admit that the Tellarites, a founding Federation member known for their engineering prowess, preferred to initiate social contact with arguments and insults. “This is delightful,” declared Lalana. “To air grievances honestly is to facilitate forthright interactions.”
“This is not an indication that the Tellarites do not believe in manners. Their Civil Conversation is a structured approach to—”
“All hands to battle stations.”
Suddenly, the reason for the Shenzhou’s course change a minute earlier became clear. Saru’s threat ganglia shot out. “We must go,” he declared.
Lalana did not share his concerns. Her hands spun. “A battle? Between spaceships? I would like to see this. Will it be visible through the window?”
“It is not safe. We must move to the ship’s interior.”
“There is nowhere in the universe which is safe,” she replied.
“Nevertheless,” said Saru. Lalana stopped spinning her hands and followed him into the hall.
Initially, the halls were empty, but as the rest of the crew roused from a slumber Saru and Lalana did not share, crewmembers appeared and moved briskly past them to assigned locations. For some, that was engineering and maintenance support posts to stand ready to deal with any ensuing damage. For most, it was interior compartments where they would strap in and ride out the danger. Those unfortunate crew who had windowless rooms on the ship’s interior were for once lucky: they could ride out the danger in place.
Aware Lalana had no such assigned space, Saru headed for a science lab he knew would be deserted at this hour. The lab lights came on as they entered. The room contained an abundance of empty transparent aluminum chambers and monitors designed for all manner of biology experiments. A stripe of red flashed across every monitor as the ship entered red alert and the lighting dimmed to combat-ready levels.
The emergency seating in the walls was just passably suitable for Saru—less so Lalana. Her physiology was so alien she seemed likely to slip out from the safety belt in the event of a heavy shock.
“Do not worry,” said Lalana, “I will lemalallen to the surface.”
This was not a concept they had so far covered. As Saru took his seat, Lalana explained. “Lemalallen is when you twine your cells into the surface of something.” The word was uniquely lului, one of those untranslatable concepts with no equivalent in English or Kelpien capable of accurately conveying the nuance of its meaning.
The Shenzhou dropped out of warp and was hit by a volley of phaser fire that elicited a distinctive auditory vibration from the shields. Saru’s ganglia, which had only just slipped back into the folds along the back of his head, reemerged. Lalana continued uninterrupted with a description that would have better suited a conversation with Paxton than Saru. “The word is a compound of lema, which means object, and lallen, which is when two lului sit in close proximity and twine their fur together.”
The Shenzhou returned fire. Saru gripped the straps on his safety belt and closed his eyes. “What—What is the purpose of it?” he asked, desperate for a conversation that would take his mind off the battle underway.
“For lemalallen the purpose is to secure yourself in a place, and for lallen, it is to experience connection with another. Lului very much enjoy physical contact.”
The gravity generators strained under the forces of evasive maneuvers, pulling them to the side. True to her word, Lalana barely moved. Her explanation continued in the calm, artificially cheerful tone of the computer’s translation.
“Though our bodies are discrete, it is preferable for us to experience being a part of a larger whole the same way our cells are a part of us, and one way is to have our discrete cellular networks in proximity with the discrete cellular networks of another.”
A tremor shook the room as all the Shenzhou’s torpedoes fired. Ten seconds later, the ship went still and quiet. The battle was over. The lighting switched from emergency settings back to regular operational levels as the red alert ended. Saru’s ganglia retracted fully.
“Captain Georgiou is a highly competent tactical commander,” was all Saru could think to say. Then: “We must remain in place until the all clear has been sounded.” It was important to keep the halls easily navigable for repair crews.
Another minute ticked by. Saru did not find the emergency seating very comfortable. “We may move about the room.” As Saru undid his safety belt, Lalana slid out from hers without undoing the latch, confirming Saru’s initial assessment.
They stood there in the science lab surrounded by empty transparent aluminum chambers, waiting monitors, and offline experimental protocols and Saru found himself at a loss. Continued conversation about Tellarites suddenly seemed unfathomably absurd. Lalana stared at him as if expecting something. Saru went to check the battle logs on one of the consoles. “It would appear we have encountered the pirates we were tracking prior to encountering you and engaged in battle with them.”
The doors slid open, revealing a woman in white silk pajamas with a snarl of honey-brown hair twisted around her head. She was not a member of the Shenzhou’s crew. Her dark, watery eyes registered surprise. “I’m sorry! I didn’t think anyone was in here,” she blurted, turning away.
“Wait,” said Lalana. “You are upset. What is wrong?”
The woman hesitated. Two Shenzhou crewmen came jogging down the hall with toolkits in hand and the woman darted into the science lab. The door slid shut behind her. “I’m sorry,” she sniffled, wiping at her eyes. “It’s just—my wife—”
“What is your name?” asked Lalana.
“Lieu—Lieutenant Yoon. Hydroponics, USS Triton.”
“And your friends call you what?”
“Daisy.”
“Then, Daisy, will you sit and tell me what has happened?” Lalana pressed her tail against Yoon’s arm, gently guiding her to the emergency seats.
Gradually, a picture emerged. The Triton had been sweeping search targets deemed minor and unlikely during the graveyard hours and stumbled across the pirates accidentally. The ensuing battle had seen the ship’s crew roused mostly from a state of deep slumber. Yoon’s wife, Morita, was senior security chief and chief tactical officer but had been unable to reach the bridge and detoured to a torpedo bay instead to assist from there. A lucky or skillful strike by the enemy had caused the bay to catch fire mid-launch. Morita and several other wounded had beamed over the Shenzhou in the battle's aftermath and Yoon accompanied them, unwilling to leave her wife's side.
Throughout this explanation, Lalana kept her tail on Yoon’s hand. Eventually, Yoon took hold of the appendage and clutched it like a lifeline. Saru was surprised how easily comforting the young officer came to Lalana. Kelpiens, being comforted by so very little in the grand scheme of things, were not known for their skills in this area.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Yoon squeaked at the story’s end.
“Let us go find out.”
“They—they told me to leave,” said Yoon, shaking her head. The duty nurse’s exact words had been that there was nothing Yoon could do in sickbay but get in the way, which sounded harsh, except the nurse’s tone had been exceedingly sympathetic and kind.
“Forever?” asked Lalana.
Yoon hesitated. “No...”
“Then let us go. Perhaps it no longer applies.”
“I can check patient status—” began Saru, but too late. Lalana was already drawing Yoon to the door. He finished lamely, “—on the monitors.”
“The only way to truly know things is to see them with your own eyes,” said Lalana. “Anything else is an echo of the truth.”
When they arrived in sickbay, it was to the sight of a body covered by a sheet. Yoon stepped tentatively forward, her face going slack. A four-eyed Kakravite moved to block her path. He was the Triton’s chief medical officer, Dr. Ek’Ez. “Daisy, no—”
“Da Hee,” called a voice. A woman with short, dark hair was on the medical slab in the corner directly to the left of the door. Yoon gasped and ran to her, stopping just short of an embrace. Burns covered the right half of Morita’s body, her modesty maintained by the presence of a blanket against her chest because most of her tank top had been incinerated. She was holding a dermal regenerator in her left hand and using it on herself. Yoon scooted over to Morita’s left side and tentatively pressed a cheek against Morita’s unburnt shoulder. Morita winced as her hand fell into her lap.
Saru questioned the wisdom of infringing upon this clearly private moment as he trailed Lalana to join the couple. Neither human seemed to take much note of their alien onlookers in the moment. Yoon looked over at the body under the sheet. “Then...”
Morita swallowed. “Walter Chen. He was... inside the field. I tried... I tried to pull him out...” She shook her head. “I told him... It was my fault he was in there.”
Yoon drew back, hiccoughed in distress, and covered her mouth with her hand as big, wet tears renewed the tracks of damp salt already painted across her face. Morita’s face twisted with unvoiced anguish.
“I’m—I’m so sorry, Reiko,” Yoon managed.
“You have much damage to your surface,” said Lalana, stretching up alongside Morita’s slab. “May I assist you?”
The tissue regenerator was laying on the blanket across Morita’s lap. Morita held it out tentatively. Lalana took the device and put it down on the slab’s edge, instead pressing the flat of her tail directly against Morita’s burned skin. What exactly she was doing, none of them could tell, least of all Morita, but the shock of the action was temporary distraction from the grief.
“Please let me know if there is any discomfort. I have only been in proximal contact with human cells once before.”
“No, it’s...” Morita shifted slightly, glancing between Yoon and Saru with confusion. “It feels much better.”
“If you continue to use your technology device, it will go much faster together, I think,” said Lalana.
Morita picked up the regenerator and switched it back on. “Who are you?”
“This is Lalana,” offered Yoon, drying her eyes on her sleeve. “She stayed with me while I was outside.”
“Yes, Daisy was very kind to tell me some of what happened on your ship. And this is Lieutenant Junior Grade Saru, but you may call him Saru.”
Hovering to the side, Saru gripped his hands together in discomfort. He had not given Lalana permission to extend that measure of familiarity to their guests, and as harmless as it was, he would have liked to make the determination for himself. It was one of those tiny measures of control that seemed insignificant but meant a great deal when you came from a species that traditionally had control over very little in their lives. Saru shuffled a half-step forward and craned his neck. “This is... lallen?”
“Lelulallen,” clarified Lalana. “Piercing the cellular barrier to assist in repairs. Though the cellular structures of humans are different from my own, we share many of the same basic materials of life. I am providing your cells with nutrients from mine and assisting in the removal of harmful microbes. I also offer my surface as a support for repairs.”
“Thank you,” said Morita, hesitantly polite. It did seem to go faster, the two of them working in tandem, but Lalana’s choice of first aid methodology drew the attention of the Triton’s doctor and he hurried over, all four of his eyes wide with alarm. The ensuing explanation of the technique did little to settle his fears, especially when his medical tricorder failed to register Lalana as a life form.
“This is an untested medical procedure,” he fretted. “There might be any number of contagions, interspecies incompatibility, radiation or...” He faltered. The tricorder failed to register Lalana, but his scan of Morita was showing significant improvement in the affected areas.
“I consented,” Morita offered, not that she actually had until now.
“Ek!” bellowed a hulking brute of a man on the other side of the room with blonde hair and blue eyes. He was shirtless and seemed to have roughly as much hair on his chest and arms as he did his head. Ek’Ez wavered.
“You will tell me at the first sign of anything and I will monitor you closely upon return to the Triton,” said Ek’Ez. The man across the room yelled again, apparently taking affront at something one of the Shenzhou’s nursing staff was doing to his leg. Ek’Ez hurried back over, shouting in reply, “I am coming, Lieutenant Larsson, please restrain yourself!” Saru startled as the aforementioned Larsson banged an angry fist on the surface of his slab and proceeded to argue loudly with Ek’Ez about the way his broken leg had been reset.
“I can’t believe him,” said Yoon softly, shaking her head at the display.
Morita was less judgmental. “Walter was his friend.”
“Was he also yours?” asked Lalana.
Somehow, the answer to this question seemed to make things worse. “I barely knew him,” said Morita. She left unexplained the details of their service together—how she had come aboard the Triton six months earlier in the position of Chen’s supervisor and been assessing his performance for reassignment pending the Triton’s upcoming decommission. She did know Chen as a colleague and a marginally competent officer, but in the aftermath of his death, she felt she had not known him nearly well enough as he deserved.
Lalana shifted her tail from one patch of skin to another, asking, “Did he choose to be where he was?”
Saru decided her curiosity was aberrantly inappropriate in this context. “Lalana, perhaps...”
She ignored the half-formed warning and continued, “You said it was your ‘fault’ that this event has happened. This is not a concept my people have a word for. It is a thousand million tiny interactions which lead us to the place in which we stand. There is no one moment or person who is more responsible for any outcome. Events are a cumulative result of all events which came before them.
“In my short time with Starfleet, I have observed that all of you choose to be here, seeing the stars, which is something I can well understand. To see even a sliver of this celestial vastness is an incredible delight. If Walter Chen chose this like you and Daisy and Saru do, then he was in a place he wished to be, doing a thing he wished to do, and his life was well-lived and his death well-chosen. That, to my people, is considered the most important thing there is, to be able to choose your own death. During the years I spent with Margeh and T’rond’n, I learned that this is a rare thing. So many living creatures die in places they do not choose, doing things they do not wish to. Walter Chen was not among them. Walter Chen was in Starfleet.”
Morita took this in carefully and calmly. The sentiment of he died doing what he loved was as true as it was insufficient recompense for the loss of a life. She understood that this strange alien was attempting to offer comfort, fraught as the attempt was with functionally meaningless information because neither she nor Yoon knew who Margeh and T’rond’n were or the circumstances of Lalana’s captivity up until this moment, and she also understood the most important thing of all. She smiled, mournfully but with a budding blossom of pride. “Yes. He was Starfleet.”
To everyone who wore that uniform and insignia, there was no greater memorial.
<< Ch. 2 - A Measured Response
Ch. 4 - The Certainty of Small Things >>
A/N: So, it is surprisingly hard to craft an alien parable out of thin air! I managed it in the end.
Also, am in Birmingham this weekend for Destination Star Trek. Feel free to drop me a line if you are as well!
The scientific inquest continued all through the night. “Are you not tired?” asked Saru when the hour began to grow late and his duty shift had long since ended. They were sitting at the dining table in the guest room, the taller chairs slightly more comfortable for Saru than the softer couch and armchair on the other side of the room, while Lalana perched atop the table with her appendages tucked beneath her body.
“I do not require sleep,” she said. “But if you are tired, then by all means, Lieutenant Saru, I will wait for you to rest.”
“Kelpiens do not require as much sleep as most other species. I was merely concerned that you might.”
“No. My cortex system requires rest occasionally, but I can cycle through resting portions of it, and of course I am always awake on the cellular level.”
That was one of the many amazing things Saru had been able to examine more thoroughly in the inquest. Lalana was not possessed of a single mind, but in a sense, had one plus a trillion. Her species was the result of symbiotic evolution between a colony of cells and a primitive multicellular organism. Her eyes, brain stem, skeletal structure, and tongue were all derived from the organism, but the cell colony had replaced every other tissue and was essentially controlling the organism’s structural remains like the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus did in certain species of Earth ants. It was an inverse of the typical model of life in the known universe, where a centralized brain controlled the rest of an organism. Here, the rest of the organism controlled the “brain.” Her cortex structure was less a true center of cognitive function and more a switchboard for the rest of her.
“Is it possible for individual cells to disagree?” Saru wondered.
“Why would we?” asked Lalana. Further forays into this line of questioning revealed that the idea was as inconceivable to her as the concept of a lului disease. “My cells chose to be me.”
There were also several questions from Dr. Channick and her staff as to the particular physical characteristics of Lalana’s biology. “Your cells change color, can they also change physical configuration?”
“Not entirely. My cells are locked together permanently. If one becomes disconnected, it immediately degrades.” She demonstrated this for Saru, letting a single tendril of her “fur” fall from her tail. It fell to the table and writhed faintly as it dissolved into a thin line of oily residue that seemed to evaporate into the air before Saru’s eyes.
It also turned out Lalana was being entirely literal where the length of her captivity relative her age was concerned.
“A cycle is not the length of time it takes Luluan to orbit Luluanilem,” she informed him when he asked about the concept in more detail. Luluanilem was the name of the lului star system—while language was not a primary focus of Saru’s inquest, he was learning a great deal about it as they spoke. Essentially, the lului language was composed of complex layers of modifiers. Lu was the name for the cellular species, lulu was a group of cells coupled with a symbiotic structure into a discrete microcellular organism, lului was an adjective or possessive used for the collective species, while Luluan meant lulu-planet and Luluanilem was lulu-planet-star. “Luluan’s orbit is not so long. It would be very tedious to use it as a... calendar unit.” The concept of a calendar was foreign to Lalana’s species, but she understood it well enough from living with the Dartarans. “We measure time by a lulala.”
“A... lulala?” They were also filling in translator gaps as they went.
“A streaming white space object which orbits our star.”
A comet. Their version of a year was a comet cycle, and when Saru ran the calculations based on the length of the day on the moon where the Dartaran couple lived and Lalana’s assurance that she understood the difference in day length between that moon and her homeworld within a reasonable degree of accuracy, he ended up with an estimated cycle length of one hundred and twenty-five years.
The current cycle had been more than three-quarters of the way through when Lalana was taken from Luluan, making her more than nine hundred years old. Suddenly the idea that six years of captivity was unremarkable made complete sense.
It also meant the mysterious planetary invaders, the Hla-pu, had come to Luluan some five hundred years ago. Saru found himself listening to an unintended aside into this history when he asked another of Dr. Channick’s questions on the subject of lului and disease.
“It is not correct to say my cells are universally resistant, certainly there are things which can kill me. The Hla-pu employed a biological agent against my people in one of their many attempts to colonize our planet. I was aboveground when they deployed it. It moved through the air, a cloud of purple smoke that stripped the leaves from the trees. I made it into the water before the smoke could reach me, but Lumlala was not so lucky. Half his body was consumed by the smoke. It melted away his cells and left only his skeletal system on one side.” Her hands knocked together in clear distress at this memory but stilled as she concluded, “We were able to salvage what remained of him and, not long after, the Hla-pu left.”
For all the atrocity of being hunted, Saru could scarcely imagine the horror of what Lalana was describing. He sat there in shocked silence.
The door chimed. It was Georgiou. Saru rose unsteadily to his feet. “Have you been here all night?” Georgiou asked, mistaking the unsteadiness for fatigue.
“I...” For once, Saru’s inability to answer had nothing to do with his usual nerves. Not that Georgiou could tell.
“This is why I do not keep important information on the cells on my surface,” Lalana continued as if Georgiou had not entered. “Do you know, when the hunters take trophies like our skulls, they think those trophies are us, but they are not us, they are the framework upon which we sit!” Her tongue clicked, likely because this practice reminded her of the horrible fate of Lumlala.
“Am I interrupting?” asked Georgiou.
“Of course,” said Lalana. “What have you come to say?”
Georgiou managed not to take offense at Lalana’s insubordinate disregard for the rank of captain. She was, after all, dealing with a more primitive species then the average spacefarer. “It would seem Beldehen Venel has escaped. We are working to secure a connection to your homeworld and your people, but at present I cannot guarantee our success in these endeavors.”
“Is that so?” said Lalana, spinning her hands. Saru had his back to her and did not notice the motion. He would have been very confused if he had. Over the course of their conversation, he had gotten the impression that spinning hands were a sign of happiness.
“We will continue to investigate. Until more is known, we will escort you to a Federation starbase. The authorities there will provide you with further assistance.”
The hand-spinning ceased. “A star-base? What is a star-base?”
“A structure in space,” supplied Saru. “A point from which starships travel and resupply.”
“Nn, that is interesting,” said Lalana, pressing her hands together and staring down at the floor in apparent thought.
Georgiou shifted her attention back to Saru. “Am I to expect you at your station on the bridge when your shift begins, lieutenant?”
“Of course, captain.” There were still two hours before his shift began, which was sufficient time for a change of uniform and even a brief nap if he decided to forego any more questions.
Georgiou’s eye narrowed ever-so-slightly in judgment. She would be doubly attentive for any lapses in Saru’s performance today in light of his overnight engagement. “I look forward to it,” said Georgiou with a note of challenge. She moved to the door and hesitated, looking back at Lalana. “You should know that a table is not considered an appropriate place to sit.”
“Oh, yes, I am well aware,” said Lalana, clicking her tongue twice.
The audacity of that did not sit well with Georgiou. “Saru, please instruct Lalana in basic social protocols before we arrive at Starbase 55. I would hate for there to be any further misunderstandings or mistakes. You may not find all species are forgiving of social impropriety.”
“Yes, captain,” promised Saru, pressing his hands together and bowing slightly in deference as the door slid shut.
“How presumptuous of Captain Georgiou to assume I have made any mistakes whatsoever,” said Lalana as she moved from the table to the chair.
Saru stood there with the sinking feeling that his involvement in this situation had not endeared him in any way to his captain. Sadly, his ganglia were in agreement.
The investigation was officially at a standstill. Unable to provide any further material benefit, Margeh and T’rond’n were instructed to return home aboard their remaining personal transport. Margeh’s final request for the Shenzhou to drop them off fell upon deaf ears. Though Georgiou now found Margeh significantly more endearing after entertaining her and her husband for dinner the previous evening, the Shenzhou was a Federation exploratory vessel and the pirate hunting mission was already well beneath its regard. To perform not one but two civilian transports on top of this would be rubbing salt in the wound.
Curiously, the Dartarans expressed a desire to bid farewell to Lalana. Georgiou had Saru escort the lului to the shuttlebay. She arrived as cheerfully irreverent as ever, bounding across the bay with a pair of leaps long enough that even Saru would have had trouble replicating the distance had he been inclined to display that level of informality while on duty. She came to an abrupt stop between Georgiou, T’Vora, and the Dartarans. The extra joint in her legs made the motion seem entirely effortless.
“I had a very interesting time on your estate,” was Lalana’s greeting. “I learned so very many things about trade and business from watching you work.”
The spiky ridges along Margeh’s jaw visibly tightened. “You...”
“I also learned so many things about ‘confidence,’ a word which has two meanings in the human language. One of them is self-assurance and the other is secrecy.” (Absent Saru for the past few hours, Lalana had been engaged with a communications officer, Paxton, in a linguistic survey both were finding entirely fruitful.) “Confidence in hand and head equally. Which into which, I wonder? Water or sand?”
T’rond’n seemed to shrink slightly, looking at Margeh for some sort of sign. The female Dartaran opened her mouth faintly, the spikes of her teeth showing in a way that felt strangely non-threatening—this was a Dartaran display of humility. “You know the lesson of Karletin?”
“As well as you,” said Lalana.
Of the three Starfleet officers in observation, only T’Vora recognized what Lalana and the Dartarans were discussing because she alone had taken the time to parse the Dartaran cultural archives to the level of detail required to catch the reference. D’rannur was a mythic philosopher (analogous to the father of Vulcan logic, Surak) who originated a Dartaran philosophy called the Head and the Hand. In this philosophy, male Dartarans were tasked with commerce, production, logistics, and trade, while females dominated sciences, culture, and spirituality. It was a primitive binary gender philosophy that espoused female intelligence and male efficiency as two components required in balance for a functional society. Unlike many other such primitive philosophies in various bi-gendered species across the galaxy, the Dartaran version persisted and defined their society to this day.
The tale of Karletin was found in the D’rannic Codices—a supplemental set of texts describing D’rannur’s life and offering largely anecdotal parables of dubious historical accuracy. Karletin was a brother of D’rannur’s mate who violated the sanctity of the homestead by selling original notes and writings to finance a business venture. When D’rannur discovered what had happened, she sabotaged Karletin’s business by mixing water into his sand pits and turning them to mud. The moral was that, like sand and water, the Head and the Hand ought to remain separate, and that betraying the homestead would lead to muddy waters. (Dartarans loved sand and water, but only separately, never together.)
The story was considered apocryphal among scholars because Karletin appeared only in this one tale and there were no uncontested historical records to support his existence, but it was enduringly popular and often featured in Dartaran wedding vows.
T’Vora realized that Lalana was essentially telling the Dartarans she had the ability to violate the sanctity of their homestead given the time she had lived with them, but also that she had no intention to do so, and she was saying this in a manner that demonstrated an almost frightening ability to obfuscate the subject matter at hand.
“Then do not make mud,” was Margeh’s solemn reply.
“I wish we could have helped you more, and sooner,” said T’rond’n.
Lalana slid towards T’rond’n and stretched up, pressing her hands onto his chest for balance and flicking her tongue out into his mouth, running the tip across his teeth.
Margeh’s response was a shriek of displeasure. “Stop that!”
“Please be mindful of your gums,” said Lalana, withdrawing and settling back down onto her haunches so she was at waist height.
Saru was startled by every aspect of this exchange: the rudeness of it in light of Georgiou’s recent admonition about impropriety, the intimacy of the action, the familiarity it seemed to require, Margeh’s sharp objection, and the vague sense that this was something T’rond’n and Lalana had done in the past when T’rond’n considered Lalana a lower, animal-level life form. It was a very uncomfortable train of thought.
Margeh grabbed T’rond’n’s arm and yanked him half a step closer to her. “How dare you,” she said.
“You did not mind this yesterday,” said Lalana. “Has something changed since then?”
Margeh hissed and T’rond’n’s jaw spikes bristled slightly in affront. They bid Georgiou a significantly more standard farewell and stepped into their transport.
As the shuttle slid through the bay forcefield, Georgiou announced, “Saru, until further notice, you are relieved of bridge duty. Please focus fully on assisting Lalana acclimate to Federation society.”
It was a significant blow to Saru’s already waning confidence. He stiffened. “Yes, captain.” As they made their way back to the guest quarters, Saru consoled himself with the thought that Georgiou’s assignment was not truly an indictment of his abilities and performance. It was more likely a redistribution of resources to where they were needed most. Not only was Saru the person on the ship who knew their alien guest best, he was also possessed of a sterling reputation for impeccable good manners.
Georgiou was entirely a great captain, Saru decided. Even though she clearly held no love for Lalana, she was doing everything she could to ensure that Lalana had the knowledge necessary to succeed in her new Federation existence.
He approached the topic as delicately as he was able once they were in privacy of the room and they had retaken their position at the dining table—both of them seated in chairs now. “Lalana, if you will recall, the captain advised against actions which would be construed as impolite. I must inform you that your behavior with T’rond’n was entirely so.”
“Yes, I am aware,” said Lalana.
This shocked Saru. “Then why did you behave in this manner?”
“Dartarans are very territorial about their mates,” she explained, which was not the answer to the question Saru had been asking.
He thought a moment. “I am aware of the unforgivable offense that Margeh and T’rond’n have committed, both in hunting you and removing you from your planet, but they were very willing to help us correct these issues and assist you. Perhaps they would have helped you sooner had they been given the chance.”
Lalana twisted her head almost a hundred and eighty degrees. “Did you think their words were true? They are sorry for the situation now because they have been exposed. Had I attempted to broach the subject to them directly during the years I spent with them, they would have done everything in their power to avoid the perception of wrongdoing.”
There was a note of darkness in that assessment which gave Saru pause. “I apologize. I do not mean to doubt your knowledge of your former captors.”
“No, that was wise of you. To you, I am hardly a known quantity.” Lalana shifted in her seat, sitting up straighter and gripping the edge of the table with her heterodactylic hands, two fingers above and two below. “Everything is about perception, Saru. The universe we see is what we know, though it is not what is, because we cannot see everything.”
Saru could see himself in her eyes, so immense and reflective were the glassy surfaces of her unblinking lenses. “We should commence with reviewing some basic diplomatic protocols,” he said simply.
“Very well, but may I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Minoru”—this was communications officer Lt. Paxton’s given name—“has told me there are no trees for climbing on a starbase, and no ponds to swim in. I very much wish to climb trees and swim again. May I go somewhere with trees and water?”
“I will compile a list of suitable candidates for you.”
“There is no need. I already know where I wish to go.”
The request was significant enough Saru felt it warranted informing Georgiou. The moment he did, a new problem cropped up: because she did not register on sensors, the holocomm system in Georgiou’s ready room was unable to render Lalana’s form properly, distorting and twisting her shape into something unrecognizable. Georgiou switched the signal to audio-only.
“I would like to go to Risa,” said Lalana’s translated voice.
“Risa?” echoed Georgiou.
“Yes. I have heard it is the most pleasant planet in the galaxy.”
There was no doubting Risa was a paradise like no other, but Georgiou inwardly doubted if Lalana would fully appreciate the pleasures the planet had to offer given her non-humanoid physiology. Then again, Risians were nothing if not accommodating, so perhaps she would.
“That can be arranged,” promised Georgiou, “though you will have to travel there from the starbase.” Lalana agreed to this condition wholeheartedly.
It was a shame that the signal was only audio. If they had been able to see one another, Georgiou and Lalana would have recognized a sympathetic similarity between them. Lalana was spinning her hands in a move of contentment that entirely matched the faint smile on Georgiou’s face at the memory of Risa.
Chapter two now ready for listening and download. As I will be traveling through the 28th, I will be unable to record the next chapter until November, but rest assured it’s on the way. Now that I understand a little better how to do everything, I’ll be able to start releasing multiple chapters in audio form every week, eventually completing the Internet’s first 400,000-word Star Trek fanfic audiobook! For... some reason.
In other news, chapter three of Secret’s End is nearly done, I’m just trying to wrestle one complicated little story point into place. Luckily, my travel plans leave plenty of time for writing, so more written chapters are imminent.
At last, chapter one of The Captain’s Secret in audio form! Only 101 more chapters to go... The second chapter is recorded and will be posted soon enough. I’m going to be in Birmingham and then traveling for a bit, so won’t be able to record more until November rolls around.
<< Ch. 1 - A Chance Discovery
Ch. 3 - Don’t Sit Down >>
A/N: Sorry for the immense delay, we had a huge surge of projects this month at work. I worked 30 hours of overtime at one point! Luckily, since my day job is writing, I enjoy it, but it left precious little time for recreational writing. Which isn't to say that I didn't find moments here and there to write a bit. Just that there weren't enough of them to finish the chapter until now, and I mostly wrote a bunch of future scenes. (Spoiler sentences have been updated accordingly.)
Readers of TCS will note the crew of the Shenzhou is somehow simultaneously much better and much worse than the Triton's...
Gradually, the situation in the Shenzhou’s medbay resolved itself—with some help from the Dartarans.
“We have never had any issue with the lului in the sense of biological contaminants,” Margeh assured Georgiou. Lalana had been living with them for six years and encountered humans and several other species with no ill effects suffered by any parties. There was also the point that, by Margeh’s description, the Gentonians running the hunting expeditions were extremely cautious and catered to a wealthy clientele whose health they valued. If Lalana or her species posed any risk, the Gentonians would have said as much before allowing Margeh and T’rond’n to take a pair of them home.
T’Vora passed this information along to Dr. Channick, who subsequently decided Lalana was less a threat to the ship and more a potential patient given the length of her captivity. This still left a central question unresolved.
“How am I supposed to know if you’re in good health?” Channick asked after the isolation field came down. She remained at a dead end with her attempts to run medical scans. Saru had been equally unsuccessful at ascertaining any scanner adjustments that would do more than provide a basic physical map of the surface of Lalana’s body. “You’ve been captive for a long time.”
“It was not so long,” said Lalana. “Not even a half of a half of a half of a half of a cycle. And I am entirely undamaged by it.”
“A cycle, is that a measurement of time for your species?” asked Saru.
“Yes. I am seven cycles of age.”
Saru followed the math without trouble. If Lalana had been captive for six years, then six was half of twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight, ninety-two. Except that would make Lalana close to seven hundred years old. Probably she was not being literal and her sense of time was confused after being separated from her natural day/night cycle for so long.
“When you say that,” Saru began, only to be cut off by Channick.
“Thing is, even if there aren’t any physical wounds, there’s the issue of long-term malnutrition. How was your diet? Were you ever sick? Any lethargy?”
Whatever Hasimova was doing with the translation was not having the intended effect. Lalana remained flummoxed by Channick’s inquiries. “Bad nutrition? How are nutrients bad?”
“Malnutrition—weakness from not eating the right foods.”
“I do not understand. Correct foods?”
“What do you typically eat on your planet?” asked Saru in an attempt to head off what seemed to be an entirely misguided line of medical questions towards an alien that clearly had little notion of medical concepts.
“Whatever I want to.”
Channick frowned. Saru’s inquiry had not ended up much more helpful than hers and she considered her own versions of the questions more important than his. “Plants, meat, fruit...”
“Yes,” said Lalana. “Anything which contains the components I require.”
So, she was an omnivore. “Perhaps I could bring you an assortment of food items and you can tell us what most resembles the food sources on your planet,” suggested Saru.
Lalana’s hands spun. “Yes, that would be lovely, Lieutenant Junior Grade Saru! You have such a long name, is there a shorter version of it?”
Saru stood there with his hands pressed together feeling moderately embarrassed as Hasimova and Channick stared at him with less than impressed expressions. This whole experience was starting to feel like a disaster. Saru desperately wanted to run out of the room and hide in the darkest corner he could find. His ganglia itched along the back of his head. “Lieutenant junior grade is my rank. Saru is my name. ‘Lieutenant Saru’ will suffice.”
The last thing Saru heard as he made his exit was Hasimova wondering aloud, “Do you want us to get you some clothes to wear?” Lalana’s response to this was not verbal: she stuck the full length of her tongue out at them and coiled it like a spring.
Gathering the various foodstuffs gave Saru a chance to collect his thoughts. What was happening in the medbay right now felt like chaos and he greatly disliked chaos. What they needed was a clear, direct plan of action and information gathering, not this hodgepodge of meandering questions dancing around important information as to who Lalana’s people were. They needed to be taking a scientific, not conversational, approach.
When he returned to the medbay armed with a tray of delicacies arranged in a series of small glass sauce bowls and a padd containing a plan that would hopefully resolve all their many issues, he found Channick finally engaged in a moment of breakthrough.
“Your question is flawed,” Lalana was saying. “How can I tell you what does not exist?”
“No diseases, no illnesses?” They were back to that line of questioning with the crucial difference that now Channick was realizing Lalana’s earlier answer in the negative was not willful obstinance but an expression of an inability to answer because the question itself was based on a faulty assumption. “But your cells, when they degrade or suffer trauma...”
“If unrepairable, they are reconsumed for materials and energy by the cells surrounding, or in the event of catastrophic contamination, they are eliminated externally.”
Channick tugged at her ear as she processed this information. In Saru’s absence, she had determined the issue with the translator was not that Lalana lacked knowledge of medical biology, but that her knowledge was an order of magnitude beyond the burgeoning translation matrix. As Channick’s questions and explanation became more technical, the computer adjusted its translations accordingly and now doctor and patient were approaching a point of didactic parity. “Can you regenerate all your tissues?”
“What is tissue?”
“Specialized cell group. Like, lung tissue is the cells used for respiration.”
“Nn, no, I am not the tissues, the tissues are the framework upon which I am around. I am the cells, and I do not regenerate, only repair as needed. A dead cell cannot be revived. New cells are created if required, but typically the cells which are me are sufficient.”
Hasimova squinted at the display on her commandeered station, not quite certain of the translation. “The cells which are you?”
“Yes. I am cells. You are also cells, you simply do not know it.”
“We know we’re made up of cells,” said Channick.
”Yes, but you do not know your cells, and your cells do not know they are you.”
That was the phrasing Channick needed to finally make sense of what Lalana was saying. “You have an awareness of your cells?”
“I am cells speaking to you in organization with the assistance of my structural tissues which enable me to operate on the same scale as you do.”
Channick wavered, feeling a sudden need to sit down, but there were no chairs in this part of the medbay. She put her hand on the nearest medical slab as her mind swirled with the implications. There was a paper in here, likely a few of them, and perhaps even a nomination for the prestigious Carrington Award. If she could determine the mechanism by which the cells were aware and their relationship to the tissue structures, not to mention the nature of the repair mechanism...
While Channick processed this, Saru put the tray of food down beside Lalana and accessed the padd. “I have several questions for you organized by subject.”
“Certainly,” said Lalana, sticking her tongue out into the bowl nearest her, which contained lettuce.
The moment Lalana’s tongue touched the leafy green, the entirety of her body turned a matching shade, replete with striations of lighter green that mimicked the lettuce veins. Saru, Hasimova, and Channick were amazed by the sight. Lalana’s “fur” (which it was now clear was anything but) even seemed to have arranged itself into clumps resembling leafy frills. The only thing left unchanged were her immense, lidless green eyes. They remained a shade of green far brighter than the lettuce.
Lalana rolled the lettuce leaf up in her tongue and pulled it whole into her mouth. “This I can eat,” she said once her tongue was returned to its normal position. Next, she stuck her tongue out into a bowl containing a small piece of cooked chicken. She turned the same brownish color as the chicken and her fur flattened, making her much the same color and texture as Saru. Then she withdrew her tongue, declaring the chicken edible but not opting to consume it.
“Remarkable,” said Channick. “Do you do this with everything you eat?”
“Oh, no, this is a game Margeh and T’rond’n enjoyed having me perform for guests, so I thought you would enjoy it.” Her tongue next went to a slice of orange, producing the most wonderful color effect as she mimicked both the rind and pulp. Hasimova gasped in delight.
“If I may begin,” said Saru, glancing at the padd. The first section was labeled Biology. The first question under the heading involved respiration and was clearly moot because Lalana was breathing the same air they were and therefore came from an M-class planet, but there might be nuances to her respiration which merited definition, especially now that she had established herself as a very different form of life. Saru took a breath and opened his mouth to ask the first question.
“That is most impressive,” Captain Georgiou’s voice cut in. She was standing in the medbay entrance, as imposing a figure as ever as her eyes scanned the scene in clear appraisal. “Lalana, your former captors have agreed to assist us in locating your planet and wish a chance to apologize to you. If you do not wish to hear them out, I fully understand.”
“I will hear them out,” said Lalana, shifting back to her previous blue-grey tone. Georgiou gestured towards the open door and Margeh and T’rond’n entered.
“Lalana,” managed Margeh, digging the claws of one hand into the other. “Whatever possessed you to keep this from us...” Georgiou’s tongue clicked in disapproval.
“We apologize,” declared T’rond’n, his voice a low boom compared to his wife’s. “We did not realize that you were... as you are. That does not excuse what happened, but we hope you will forgive us.”
“Certainly,” said Lalana, which seemed generous of her.
“We will do everything we can to assist in ending the hunt of your people,” promised Margeh.
Georgiou spoke again. “There are Federation laws which govern planets like yours which do not have warp drive technology. These laws dictate that we do not interfere with the evolution of your species. To that end, the Federation will endeavor to return you to your planet and stop this atrocity from occurring further.”
Lalana’s hands pressed tightly together—intently, thought Saru—and she said, “That would be... How will you do this?”
“Together, as is the Federation way,” said Georgiou.
Seated in the middle of the conference table staring out at the stars, Lalana had little new information to offer Georgiou. Aside from the history of invasion and hunting, she knew of no interstellar landmarks that might assist them in locating her planet and possessed no information on the Gentonians who were ransacking her world for profit. “It was a red star,” Margeh offered. She, Georgiou, and T’rond’n were sitting around the table in the chairs surrounding it, as intended.
“How would you know?” asked Lalana, tilting her head backward at an angle that suggested her neck bones were capable of spontaneously disconnecting.
Margeh bristled. It was a well-known fact Dartaran visual range was limited when it came to the lower bands of the spectrum. “Because the star was not very bright and was much closer to the planet than most. It could only have been red.”
“There were very few stars visible,” recalled T’rond’n. “The atmosphere must have been thick.”
“The air did smell thick,” said Margeh firmly. What Dartarans lacked in color perception, they more than made up for in other ways. “And the Gentonians are on Risa. We have the contact name written down somewhere, I am sure of it. If you could just bring us back to our home, we will find the name in short order.”
“We have already been in contact with the Risian authorities. They will provide a list of Gentonians on the planet.”
“Our home is only a few hours travel for you,” said Margeh. It was not the first time she had suggested to Georgiou that the Shenzhou provide them a free ride back at speeds much faster than the personal transport currently parked in the Shenzhou’s shuttle bay could manage.
“We are already engaged on a mission,” replied Georgiou curtly. (Which was true, but while Georgiou was mediating this situation, the pirate mission was on hold. Georgiou simply had no interest in playing chauffeur for the Dartaran couple.)
The comms pinged. “Captain, incoming transmission from Risa.”
“Put it through,” said Georgiou, pleased by the speed of the Risians’ response. The Risians were nothing if not accommodating—as eager to please a far-off Starfleet captain as they were the many tourists who visited their planet.
The woman who appeared on the conference viewscreen was the exact sort of living advertisement for Risa that the Risian Hedony liked to employ as a first point of contact. She was stunningly beautiful, with waves of honeyed hair cascading down her shoulders, deep green eyes, and sun-kissed skin. A traditional Risian disc adorned her forehead and an array of tropical flowers filled the frame behind her. If the woman found anything odd about the sight of a Federation captain, two Dartarans, and a blue alien sitting on top of a table, she showed no outward sign of it. “Warm welcomes from Risa, the most pleasant planet in the galaxy. Minister Karrin has readied the data you requested. Please stand by for transmission.” She pressed a button on her console. The Shenzhou’s computer registered receipt. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”
“For the moment, this will suffice,” said Georgiou, smiling. “We will be in touch again shortly.”
“Certainly,” said the woman. “Let us know if you require anything else. We’re more than happy to be of service. Thank you for contacting Risa.”
“Thank you,” said Georgiou, lingering a moment before terminating the connection.
Images, names, and visa details of all the Gentonians on Risa during the period of time six years ago when the Dartarans had arranged their hunting trip appeared on the conference room viewscreen. Georgiou gestured for Margeh, T’rond’n, and Lalana to make of the images what they could.
Lalana moved to the edge of the table nearest the viewscreen, letting Margeh and T’rond’n control the scroll of images while she watched from between their shoulders. Yellow and green faces with whisker-like protrusions above their mouths flitted by. Most were merchants or traders—Gentonians were consummate traders—but there were several tourists in the mix along with the full staff directory of the Gentonian embassy. T’rond’n startled. “There! That is the one. I am certain of it.”
The Gentonian in question had pale yellow skin with brownish spots. The name beneath the image was “Beldehen Venel.” He was listed as having a merchant license associated with a company called Starway Traders and his current visa status was “ACTIVE, ON PLANET.”
“Computer, display all Starway Traders employees.” Seven Gentonians appeared. “Do you recognize any others?”
Margeh and T’rond’n took their time studying the other names and faces. “No,” concluded Margeh. “The only one we ever saw on Risa was Venel, and none of these Gentonians were on the ship that took us to the planet.”
“Lalana?” prompted Georgiou. “Do you recognize any of them?”
“Nn,” went Lalana, “I do not.”
“Venel was not on the expedition himself,” said Margeh. “He merely arranged our transport.”
Georgiou pressed the intercom button on the conference table console for the bridge. “Please contact Minister Karrin on Risa.” The communications officers on the bridge responded in the affirmative. Georgiou considered Lalana and suggested, “Perhaps you would like to sit in a chair?”
“No,” said Lalana lightly, curling her tail around her legs.
The response from Risa was swift. This time, the Risian woman did not appear on the screen. Instead, a hologram of a male Risian appeared standing in the conference room with brown skin, dark hair and eyes, and an effusive smile. He had the same traditional disc on his forehead and was wearing a blue suit with a white sash. “Captain Georgiou,” he greeted, clearly expecting her.
Georgiou wasted no time. “We have identified a person of interest in an ongoing violation of Starfleet’s General Order One.” With a flick of her finger, Georgiou sent Venel’s details to Karrin. “I am with two Dartarans and a member of the aggrieved species who can corroborate this violation. According to the data you sent, the individual is on Risa at present. He must be detained immediately.”
Karrin’s smile faltered. Risians disliked the appearance of police authority. Risa was largely a safe place to visit, but it was not without its share of crime, mostly because the Risians found it preferable to compensate victims after the fact than to foster an atmosphere of oppressive security that would more fully prevent incidents. “General Order One?”
“Exploitation of a pre-warp species,” clarified Georgiou. On the conference table, Lalana began to knock the knuckles of her hands together. T’rond’n noted this with concern but remained quiet and still in his seat.
“That is...” Karrin’s face clouded. A moment later, it cleared into firm resolve. “We’ll assist in any way we can.” He took a step to the side, pressing a finger to an unseen console on his end of the transmission. “Sollis, are you available?”
The Risian woman from before appeared on the conference room viewscreen as she patched herself into the transmission. “Yes, minister.”
“Can you locate someone for us? Discreetly.”
“Certainly.” It took her only a moment to perform the task. “Beldehen Venel left Risa twenty minutes ago.”
Thirty minutes ago, the Shenzhou had requested information on Gentonians from the Risian authorities. That simple request had evidently been enough to tip Venel off.
On the table, Lalana clicked her tongue. “Oh, that is too bad,” she said. “It seems I will never return home now.”
Saru was convinced of his overall failure in the meager soft first contact task he had requested, so it came as a welcome surprise when Georgiou ordered him to escort Lalana to guest quarters from the conference room. He appeared at the door and stood in stiff, observant attention, his padd of questions still in hand. Lalana amiably strode out to join him in the hallway without a single word of farewell towards Georgiou, Margeh, or T’rond’n. Her only words were to Saru. “Shall we go?”
Saru looked across the conference room at Georgiou. She seemed mildly amused by this lapse of decorum. Not all aliens placed the same value on the niceties that fell under the heading of human good manners, as common as the basic concepts of greeting and farewells were across most cultures and species. “Captain?” called Saru, seeking her permission. Georgiou responded by merely waving her hand at him dismissively and the doors slid shut.
Lalana stared up at Saru expectantly, balancing on a combination of her legs and tail. Saru made a gesture of his own, indicating the direction of the nearest turbolift. “This way.”
Absent a human escort, Saru took a large step in the indicated direction. He was about to self-correct himself to a shorter stride when he realized Lalana matched the distance without trouble and seemed to be perfectly at home doing so. Though she was barely a third of his height, she had very long legs with an extra joint that made them stretch out more horizontally than vertically. He opted to continue at his natural walking gait and felt strangely reassured by the way she glided down the hallway at his side.
“I feel I should inform you,” he said when the wonder of the moment had passed, “humans and many other species find it customary to offer words when arriving and departing a location.”
“Yes, I have observed this behavior often,” said Lalana as they arrived at the turbolift doors.
Which meant she knew how it worked. Had her wordless departure been an intentional slight against the others in the room? Saru asked as delicately as he could, “Your people do not have such a custom?”
“No. This is not something my people typically do.”
That would seem to explain it, then, though Saru imagined she might well harbor lingering resentment towards the Dartarans for their role in her captivity. The turbolift arrived and they stepped inside. “It was very magnanimous of you to accept the Dartarans’ apology despite what they did to you.”
“What they did to me?”
“Yes, hunting you and keeping you captive for so many years.”
“It was not so long and I do not mind it,” said Lalana. “It is over now regardless.” The turbolift doors opened onto deck four and they exited. “Now I suppose I shall have to watch Federation walls.”
“Certainly not,” Saru assured her. “We will bring you back to your planet. Captain Georgiou is a very accomplished captain and will no doubt be successful.”
“Nnn,” hummed Lalana. “And if she is not? What then?”
Saru pressed his fingers together uncertainly. He did not doubt Georgiou’s success and had not given the possibility much thought. Thinking on it now, he found he had no answer. “We will deal with that eventuality should it come to pass. I assure you, the Federation will provide whatever accommodations you require.”
“As Margeh and T’rond’n did?”
That gave Saru pause. Twice now he had heard Lalana describe the Federation in unflattering terms. First, over the ship-to-ship communications, where she had declared herself uninterested in being subjected to “Federation machinations,” and then in the medbay, where she had described herself as having been “captured by the Federation.”
“We will not confine you,” promised Saru. “The purpose of the Federation is to unite the peoples of many worlds so that we may collectively flourish in an environment of peaceful cooperation, and to provide freedom, justice, and opportunity for all citizens.”
Lalana’s hands suddenly began to spin. “Is it? I have always heard that the Federation is largely interested in regulating and restricting trade.”
“That is demonstrably untrue,” said Saru, wondering where she would have gotten that idea.
“I wonder which is more true, the description a person has of themselves, or the descriptions others have of the person.” They had arrived at the guest quarters. Lalana went straight to the window and the vista of stars. She looked out for a moment, then turned to Saru, hands still spinning. “Whether the walls are Dartaran or Federation, it has been worth it to meet a new form of life which I had not seen previously.”
“That is... why I joined Starfleet,” said Saru, surprised.
“Then you were right. We are not so different. Now, what questions did you have to ask?”
The Captain’s Secret (415k words, complete)
Spoiler Sentences, Vol. II
Part I - In Another Life
1 - A Chance Discovery
“I think you will find our species have many things common.”
2 - A Measured Response
“I wonder which is more true, the description a person has of themselves, or the descriptions others have of the person.”
3 - Don’t Sit Down
“You should know that a table is not considered an appropriate place to sit.”
4 - The Certainty of Small Things
“Captain, USS Triton has sent a distress signal.”
5 - Laugh It Off
“Humor is highly subjective. It could be... problematic.”
6 - Fruit of the Poison Tree
“Watch out for the Jabberwock.”
7 - If You Never Ask
“It is my honor to mentor young officers in Starfleet. Exceptional potential deserves exceptional recognition.”
A/N: Welcome to Secret's End, side-quel to my other fanfic, The Captain’s Secret. You do not need to read the other fanfic to read this one. They are connected, but they are equally independent of each other.
If you have read the other one, there are a few secrets you'll spot right off the bat and and a few spots of retread, but this is a very different story told from a different perspective and with a different sequence of events. Think of it as a chance to discover the characters and some of the secrets anew and learn some secrets and answers the other story did not include.
Additionally, I am pleased to say that, in keeping with the same thing that made the Captain's Secret possible, the final chapter of this has already been written. Spoiler sentences, for those interested, are available.
Standing at the science station on the bridge of the USS Shenzhou, Saru found no comfort in the acoustic soundscape of life aboard a starship, but after five years in space, he was growing accustomed to it. As he scanned for anomalies in an otherwise unremarkable region of space, he could pick out each individual component of what he was hearing: the faint thrum of the engines and warp field, the soft murmurs of the officers around him as they communicated with non-bridge crew across the rest of the ship, the blips of acknowledgment as his crewmates tapped commands into their consoles, and the almost imperceptible hiss of atmosphere through the environmental filters. He could identify, too, the direction of each of these noises, so he could tell when a computer blip came from the ops console ahead to his right or the tactical station off to the left—even with his eyes closed.
To most, this would have seemed a remarkable feat, but to Saru, it was a constant reminder of the fact he was a Kelpien—a sapient prey species shaped by millions of years of evolution on a planet where every bush, tree, and rock contained lurking danger. The net result of this long history of anxiety was that Kelpiens were always in a state of high alert for danger.
It had also given them a reputation as cowards which Saru could not wholly deny. As peaceful and calm as the bridge was at the moment, the fact that this could change in the blink of an eye was creating within him an impulse to run somewhere more predictably safe. He fought this instinct by focusing on what was in front of him at the science station. In a universe where every moment held potential chaos, science was a steady constant and Saru’s greatest comfort.
Presently, his display was showing him a map of the local region. It was largely unremarkable. A couple of subspace eddies, a few planetary points of interest, all of it well-mapped and in no need of investigation. The Shenzhou was an exploratory vessel that had been temporarily retasked to deal with a regional group of pirates at the behest of a local government, the Dartaran Council. Normally such a task would be considered well beneath the Shenzhou’s prominence, but the Dartarans were in the process of considering Federation membership. Wiping out these pirates was seen as a positive step towards cementing the relationship and Starfleet wanted one of its most reliable on the job. That meant Saru’s captain, Philippa Georgiou, whose presence commanded instant respect in this and many other regions of space. As soon as the Shenzhou figured out what well-mapped rock the pirates were hiding on, they would complete the mission and return to their regular exploratory duties.
For now, the patrol continued.
Saru sensed the danger before there seemed to be any evidence of it. The tiny, fleshy tendrils of threat ganglia along the back of his head tingled and emerged from beneath the flap normally concealing them. He brought his hand up towards the tendrils, wondering the cause and hoping no one had noticed.
“Commander, we’re receiving a shortrange transmission,” said the ensign on communications, Hasimova. “Dartaran in origin.”
“Onscreen,” was the command from the captain’s chair. T’Vora, the Shenzhou’s first officer, waited impassively as this order was not carried out.
“The signal’s distorted,” said Hasimova, too embarrassed to play the messy noise over the bridge comms. “I can’t translate it yet.”
Saru understood the ensign’s embarrassment all too well. He felt similarly about the writhing mess of ganglia on the back of his head. “There is a subspace eddy between us and the signal’s origin,” he offered. “Compensating.” The task calmed him and his ganglia withdrew from sight.
Signal cleaned, Hasimova was able to pull it up on the viewscreen. What they saw astonished them.
It was alien, that much was clear. The question was what kind of alien. It had grayish blue fur and a pair of enormous, almost perfectly-round, lidless green eyes with six pupil slits arranged in a ring. The color and arrangement reminded Saru of an Earth fruit he had recently tried called a “kiwi.” The rapid stream of syllables coming out of the creature’s mouth was unlike anything Saru had ever heard before. He could see its tongue fluttering to produce the wet, lilting sequence of sounds. It was wearing some sort of white garment, the collar just visible on the screen.
T’Vora hit the comm command on her armrest. “Captain to bridge. We have encountered an unknown species.” Her finger lifted from the comm. “Cross-reference against the known species database.”
“Yes, sir,” said Saru, though like T’Vora, he already suspected this was a futile effort because the computer would have been able to translate the language if it belonged to a known species.
“—lemalunilalamelanalilianilililialemalal—”
“Where are we on translation?”
“Almost there,” promised the ensign.
“—lalimilalilunilalamanilamili—me! Help me, please! Is there anyone there? Please, can anyone hear me? Help me! Hello, can someone please help me?” The universal translator rendered the voice as high-pitched in keeping with the alien’s natural tone.
This was the sound that Captain Philippa Georgiou arrived to as she strode onto the bridge and T’Vora turned over the captain’s chair.
“Status report.”
“We’re tracking a Dartaran transport broadcasting a distress signal,” said T’Vora, moving to the tactical console and displacing an ensign back to observer status.
“Set a course to intercept and open a channel,” ordered Georgiou, issuing commands as smoothly as if she had been there the whole time.
The alien continued its pleading unabated. “If there’s someone out there, anyone, please, I need—” There was a beeping sound on the transmission as the Shenzhou hailed. The alien twisted its head in confusion. “Hello? Can you hear me? Is someone there? Hello? Hello?”
Georgiou’s eyes were on Hasimova. The ensign sat with her hand to her ear pensively, shook her head, and sent the hail again. The alien began shifting, searching its console for the source of the beeps. Hasimova nodded her head sharply at Georgiou as the signal connected.
“Alien vessel, this is Captain Philipp—”
The alien’s reaction was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. “I see you! You’re human! Can you see me?”
If Georgiou was taken aback by the alien’s interruption, she made no outward sign of it. “Yes, though I am unfamiliar with your species. This is the Federation starship Shenzhou, responding to your distress signal. What is the problem?”
“Feder... Federation. Nnnn...” Mention of the Federation seemed to dim the alien’s enthusiasm. The alien tilted its head downward so the glassy surface of its eyes reflected the lights and displays of the navigational controls on its ship.
“Are you in need of assistance?” asked Georgiou.
“Nn,” went the alien. “Yes, though...” Its hands came into view in front of its face, eight knobbly-knuckled fingers pressing together, four on each hand.
“We are prepared to help. Can you tell us your species?”
“I am a lului. My name is Lalana.”
Georgiou sounded it out. “La-lu-na?”
The hesitation continued. “Nn. Lalana.”
“Lalana”—it still sounded like laluna to Saru’s ears when Georgiou said it—“we would be happy to help you if you tell us what is wrong.”
Lalana’s hands lowered to chin level. “I am attempting to escape.”
“Captain,” said T’Vora, “I’m detecting a second Dartaran vessel in pursuit of the first. An identical personal transport vessel.”
“That is them! Please, please, don’t let them take me back. I beg of you, help me!” The fingers on the viewscreen curled and began to rapidly knock together in some sort of agitation display.
“The pursuit vessel is broadcasting a message,” reported Hasimova.
“Onscreen,” said Georgiou. Lalana’s image shifted to the left to make room for both signals.
Two Dartarans appeared, brown-skinned with orange streaks along their spiky jawlines. The smaller one said in a sharp, authoritarian tone: “Federation starship! We are in pursuit of stolen property. This is an internal Dartaran matter. No assistance is required. Repeat. Federation starship! We are...”
“Hail them. Dartaran vessel, this is the USS Shenzhou. The vessel you are pursuing is requesting our help. Identify yourselves.”
The smaller Dartaran bristled visibly, her jaw spikes seeming to sharpen as the skin around them contracted. “No help is required. We are perfectly capable of handling this. The Federation holds no jurisdiction here.”
“The pursuit vessel will engage its target in five-point-seven hours at present speeds,” reported T’Vora. That seemed an excessively long timeframe. Saru noted the two ships were barely capable of warp two. He also noticed something else unusual, but he was not the one to speak the fact aloud, T’Vora did. “Captain, I am detecting no life signs aboard the lead vessel.”
Lalana stared at them, her fingers still a mess of motion, the pupils in her eyes contracting and expanding. “You would not detect me, but if you will not help me, then will you kindly shoot me out of the sky? You have this ability, yes?”
The sounds of the starship came to the forefront again as the Dartarans and the crew of the Shenzhou fell silent and processed that request.
“That is not necessary,” said Georgiou. “Dartaran vessel, am I to understand that you are in pursuit of a ship which was stolen from you?” The Dartarans shifted, exchanged a glance, but did not answer.
Lalana answered for them. “The ship is not the property they wish the return of. The property is me.”
“He lies,” said the female Dartaran. “We are his caretakers, captain, and wish only to bring him home safe. This is a... private issue.”
There were two conflicting stories at play and no clear evidence of fault. Georgiou opted for a middle road approach. “This is not something which can be easily resolved over communications. We will therefore rendezvous with you and you may sort this out aboard the Shenzhou. We will, of course, contact the Dartaran Council to advise us and make sure your laws are followed.”
It was such a reasonable proposal the Dartarans were having a hard time throwing up objections to it. They glanced at each other again, not sure how to avoid this course of action.
On the left side of the viewscreen, Lalana’s fingers pressed tightly together again. “I have no wish to trade one set of captors for another. I would sooner die free upon a starship of my own command than to subject myself to any Federation machinations. I will not have conditions placed upon me when I am already free among the stars as I have longed to be. I have survived the hunt, I have survived the holding, and I choose this death.” That stated, Lalana's head drew back and slammed down face first against the ship’s console with such force it sounded like two rocks striking together. Then the lului repeated the motion with a thwack that sounded like something breaking.
The sight disturbed everyone, even the Dartarans. “Stop!” said the larger Dartaran, his eyes refocusing in alarm. “Come home, we can—” The female Dartaran put a clawed hand on the male’s arm and squeezed, hard.
Lalana did stop, for a moment. “Why would I go home with you? You do not even know my gender. I am not a male!”
It was a definitive nail into the coffin of the Dartarans’ narrative. Georgiou said coolly, “We wish only to discern the truth of this matter. Once we have done so, then we will determine the best course of action for everyone, yourself included.”
The female Dartaran abruptly cut their side of the feed, ostensibly to confer privately with her companion. That left Lalana onscreen and afforded Georgiou a moment to speak in equal privacy.
“Have you been held against your will?”
Lalana tapped her fingers together. “Not lailen.”
“The translator didn’t get that,” reported Hasimova. “Can you clarify lailen?”
“Two and two is lailen.”
Hasimova’s brow knit. If lailen meant four, the computer would have registered the word as such, but something was causing the translation matrix to balk. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I can’t translate that.”
“It is unimportant,” said Georgiou. “We will help you if help is warranted. This I promise.”
When the Dartarans resumed communications, they were resigned to their fate and accepted the rendezvous coordinates without further objection. Lalana was similarly amenable with the caveat that she did not possess the skills necessary to carry out the navigational request. “I do not know what ‘coordinates’ are and while I was able to make the ship start, I do not know how to make it stop.”
The simplest solution was for someone to beam over to the transport and take control of the vessel. Commander Jones, one of the chief engineers, accepted the task. They matched warp speed to the Dartaran shuttle and initiated a transport.
Jones’s assessment of the situation was immediate and unexpected. There was a problem.
“Captain, the control panel was damaged and the warp drive is stuck in a power cycle loop. I can’t disengage it.”
“I suppose I should not have hit the table with my face,” said Lalana, clicking her tongue in a manner that had to indicate alarm at her predicament.
Jones ignored the commentary. “The drive will go critical in eight minutes.”
“Beam them out,” ordered Georgiou.
“I can’t lock on to the alien, captain,” was the reply from Garcia, the operations officer.
Georgiou mentally reviewed the Starfleet core breach checklist. “Can you jettison the core?”
“Negative, it’s an integrated system.”
There were no escape pods on the shuttlecraft. There were two emergency spacesuits. Jones held one up and looked at Lalana. “Let’s try and get this on you.”
“Six minutes to core overload,” reported Garcia.
The spacesuit effort was not going very well. Jones gave it his best shot but once the puffy white garment Lalana was wearing came off, it became clear to everyone watching that Lalana’s alienness extended well past her giant eyes and furry blue head. She was not humanoid. A long tail drifted behind her, thin for most of its length and terminating in a broad spoon shape. “Perhaps we should break my legs,” she suggested.
“A containment crate!”
Everyone turned to look at Saru. The attention was enough to draw out his threat ganglia again; the sensation of so many eyes upon him was deeply unsettling. He sputtered a moment and pushed through the distress.
“A reinforced biological containment crate would withstand the vacuum of space and provide life support long enough to tractor it aboard. We have several in cargo bay three. We need only beam one over.”
“Do it,” said Georgiou. The crew hastened to comply in the remaining four minutes. Garcia contacted the cargo bay officer on duty and looped him in. Georgiou issued a quick set of commands to confirm their course of action for all: beam over a crate, put Lalana in the crate, jettison the crate from the shuttlecraft and tractor it. “That was an excellent idea, Mr. Saru.”
“Thank you, captain,” said Saru. There was something vaguely dazed in his tone. As important as coordinating Lalana’s rescue was, he was preoccupied by something she had said before smashing her head against the console.
Georgiou rose from the captain’s chair and moved towards the turbolift. Saru straightened slightly, mouth open as if he wanted to speak. Georgiou paused mid-stride and asked, “Something on your mind, Mr. Saru?”
“Captain, may I—may I—”
Georgiou’s head twisted slightly in an indication she did not appreciate the stammer in a moment where time was of the essence.
“—meet our guest with you?”
“Come,” Georgiou invited. Saru followed her into the turbolift with hands clasped in front of him. The doors slid shut and the turbolift began its path downward towards the shuttlebay.
“Captain, if I may draw your attention to something that was said during the transmission, Lalana made reference to a hunt.”
“I heard the same.”
“It is my impression she may have been hunted as my people once were.”
Georgiou did not reply; that was equally obvious to her.
“It may be of benefit for our guest to have a non-human present when meeting us.”
“It may,” agreed Georgiou.
“Firsthand experience with an unknown alien species would additionally assist me in receiving first contact certification.”
“Mr. Saru, you are already in the turbolift, you do not need to justify your presence further.”
The turbolift doors opened. Georgiou strode out and Saru followed a moment later, realizing he had gotten bogged down in semantics in a moment when action was preferred. He mentally bemoaned his mistake. Semantics were part of how he processed things and it was an easy pattern to fall back into when he was feeling stressed, as he was right now.
They arrived as the cargo crate slipped through the containment field over the mouth of the shuttlebay. Jones was with it, tethered to the crate’s lid. He rolled off and stood up as the crate touched the ground, prioritizing opening the container over removing his own spacesuit. Lalana’s head and eyes popped up into view. She gripped the lip of the crate with four-fingered hands and twisted around, taking in the view.
“Captain, the shuttlecraft has exploded,” T’Vora reported over the comms. Georgiou responded with thanks and approached the crate with Saru as Jones removed his suit helmet.
“It is very grey. Is it always this grey?” Lalana asked Jones.
“Yeah,” said Jones.
“Nnh,” was Lalana’s response. She hopped out of the crate, revealing long, thin legs with an extra set of joints beyond the arrangement possessed by Kelpiens and humans. Viewed in full, her body had a configuration not unlike a gerboa. She used her tail as a counterbalance to the mass of her torso and spun her hands in front of her in a motion like a fruit fly.
Saru balked slightly at her unclothed state. He stared as Georgiou provided a standard greeting followed by a very specific circumstantial stipulation. “As we have not encountered your species before, we must place you under a medical quarantine, for your safety as well as ours.”
“Place me below what?” responded Lalana.
“Containment in a medical facility,” clarified Saru. “Until we are certain our species pose no risk to one another.”
Lalana touched her tail to the floor for support and leaned stiffly back on her haunches. “Imprisonment,” she said.
“No,” said Georgiou. “It is standard procedure when meeting a new species. You will be free to go after you have been examined. Commander Jones, you will go as well.”
“Yes, captain.”
There was an open secret in the air. The crux of the issue was not exposure to new alien life, it was that said new alien life had not undergone transporter biofilter protocols. There was no reason for Jones to be quarantined—he could have undergone those protocols himself now that he was aboard—except to provide Lalana some form of accompaniment as reassurance of their benevolence.
Security officers arrived. Georgiou signaled them to provide escort. “Come, tell us how you came to encounter the Dartarans.”
“Certainly. Four cycles ago, the Hla-pu came to Luluan in their ships and attempted to build structures on our planet...”
What followed was a detailed accounting of an alien invasion by a violent species intent on subjugating Lalana’s homeplanet for unknown reasons. Georgiou and Saru listened intently as Lalana explained how the invaders had engaged in various methods of genocide against her people, including burning the forests her species lived in and unleashing biological agents into the air.
By the time they arrived in the medical bay, Saru had ascertained that the lului were not a prey species in the same sense as Kelpiens. Lalana’s description made clear her people were not content to be victims of invasion. “Every time they came back, we fought them again, careful not to kill them but to destroy the implements of their colonization efforts and reduce their structures back to the component elements. Finally, the cycle concluded, the Hla-pu went away and were not seen again. We thought the issue to be resolved, but then the hunters came.”
“The hunters were the Dartarans?” asked Georgiou.
“Oh, no, not until much later did the Dartarans arrive. The merchants came alone at first, to assess the value of the venture, and once they determined it was solvent, they began to bring their clients.”
Saru realized Lalana was not giving them a direct explanation of her presence with the Dartarans so much as an accounting of her planet’s history in significantly more detail than was usefully applicable.
The comms beeped. The Dartarans were aboard. Georgiou ordered T’Vora to escort their other guests to the conference room while the Shenzhou’s chief medical officer, Dr. Channick, instructed Lalana to move onto one of the medbay slabs and enacted a containment field until she could determine what threat, if any, Lalana posed.
Lalana reacted to the field by beginning to knock her knuckles together rapidly.
“Please, continue,” said Georgiou.
“Nn.” Lalana’s twelve pupils constricted to slits. The level of detail in her account dropped to almost nothing. “There were many hunters in the three cycles following and then the Dartarans came and captured me and Lalaran and took us to their home.”
“Another of your species?” Georgiou guessed.
“Yes. But he died shortly after arrival. He was not suited to captivity. I remained until I was able to take their ship and make my way to the stars. Then you found me.”
Georgiou considered the totality of the story. “Lalana, can you tell us where your world is located?”
“In relation to what? I do not even know where I am now.”
Georgiou left Saru to make what he could of their guest and proceeded to the conference room. T’Vora met her in the hallway outside and they entered together as a minor show of solidarity and strength.
The Dartarans were seated on the far side of the table facing the door in a defensive position, their backs to the stars outside the window. The female Dartaran, Margeh, rose as they entered. Her husband, T’rond’n, remained seated in a manner that felt vaguely subservient, his hands stuffed into the billowy cloth of his long-sleeved robe.
“Captain Georgiou,” began Margeh, leaning forward with her hands on the table.
Georgiou was calmly accusatory as she and T’Vora sat down across the table. “You lied to me,” she said. “You identified yourselves as caretakers.”
“We are,” said T’rond’n.
“Keeping a sentient species hostage? Perhaps the word means something different in your language.”
Margeh’s claws tightened, her nails scraping faintly on the conference table’s matte surface. “Captain, until today, we did not even know he—she could speak!”
As incredible as that assertion was, there was no indication from either that this was anything short of the truth and Lalana’s capacity to refute the claim reduced their incentive to lie significantly. “Then tell me, how did you come to meet Lalana?”
The picture Margeh and T’rond’n painted was much clearer than Lalana’s.
They were hunters. They made no effort to hide this fact. It was a hobby they shared and enjoyed primarily in the privacy of their own estate, which they kept stocked with the most challenging game they could find. “We do not typically kill our prey,” explained Margeh. “We simply enjoy the art of tracking and disabling them.”
Their hobby had drawn them into contact with other hunters, including an Eska who had been on an expedition with a group of Gentonians to hunt “the most elusive prey in the known universe.” A species that could camouflage itself into its surroundings, had no heat signature, and did not show up on standard scanners. “A challenge like no other,” their Eska friend promised.
It was an opportunity Margeh and T’rond’n could not pass up. “If we had known they were sentient, we would never have gone!” Margeh assured. She remained standing as she recounted these events, pacing and occasionally gripping the table, chairs, and T’rond’n with her pinprick-sharp claws.
“It was our understanding they were mere animals,” said T’rond’n. “The lului has been... has been in our house for years, captain. We intended it no harm.”
“In that time, it never spoke,” said Margeh. Then she repeated, again, what she felt to be the crucial detail of their involvement: “We do not kill our prey.”
There was the matter of the other dead lului, Lalaran. “That one also did not speak?” queried T’Vora.
“It died shortly after we brought it home,” explained Margeh. She finally sat down. “There was... The man in charge of the expedition, Eggal or something similar, insisted on changing the other lului’s tongue so it would cease making incessant noise. He said it was standard procedure.”
“Changing?”
“Cutting it, as you would a malspat’s tail,” said T’rond’n. Though neither Georgiou nor T’Vora knew that a malspat was a spike-tailed creature often kept as a Dartaran pet once its tail spike was removed, both understood the implication.
“We did not cut the—it—her tongue because she did not make noise like the other one. We thought she was abnormal, deficient. She was very easy to catch. It seemed kinder to remove her from her native environment than leave her there. She could not even properly camouflage herself. Another hunter would have taken her easily.”
Georgiou considered the Dartarans. Between their story and Lalana’s lay something that felt like the truth. Neither side contradicted the other, but their combined inability and unwillingness to communicate the two sides of the narrative had led them both to a collective point of misunderstanding. Georgiou folded her hands on the conference table. She had only one question to ask in light of this information.
“Would you help us contact these people who arranged your hunting trip?”
“Of course, captain. We will help you in any way we can.”
Things were not going so smoothly in the medical bay. “I don’t know what to do,” Channick admitted, tugging on her ear with annoyance. “Literally none of these scans are working.”
“Optical and sonar only,” said Lalana. Her pupils were still heavily constricted and she was hunched on top of the medical slab with her tail circled around the base of her body, creating the impression she was a single, solid jellybean shape. Jones stood off to the side, entirely disinterested in the proceedings and dismayed at being stuck in sickbay for the sole purpose of good optics. He wasn’t even supposed to be on this shift, except Georgiou’s regular first-shift chief engineer, Commander Dahan, was on leave.
“Perhaps I can adjust the electromagnetic scanners to compensate,” suggested Saru.
“I will not register. My electromagnetic radiation field is indistinguishable from the background noise of the universe.”
“How can that be?” asked Saru.
Lalana said nothing.
“Is there something bothering you?”
“It is very bright.”
The medbay was one of the best-lit areas of the ship. “Computer, lights to eighty percent,” said Channick, and the light dimmed.
“Not those lights, the wall,” said Lalana.
Saru pressed his hands together thoughtfully, connecting her words to an earlier observation. “Do you mean the biological containment field?”
“The wall of particles? Yes.”
“You can see that?” asked Channick.
“You cannot?” They could, but only when it was being turned on, off, or actively containing something. All other times, it was transparent to Saru and the humans in the room.
“I can’t turn it off,” lamented Channick. “There might be parasites, or toxins... I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about your species. Can you tell me what sort of diseases or illnesses you’re prone to?”
“No.”
Hasimova had come down from the bridge and was fiddling with the translation matrix on one of the medbay monitors. She changed a few settings. “Diseases and illnesses,” she repeated, setting the translator to render the words in Dartaran.
“No,” said Lalana again.
“Help me out here,” said Channick. “I can’t scan you. I can’t turn the iso field off until I confirm you’re safe.”
“I will attempt to adjust the isolation field to a more comfortable frequency,” suggested Saru, largely as an aside for his own benefit because no one else was paying him any attention. He located an open workstation and began to contemplate the medical isolation field mechanics and how they might be affecting lului eyes.
“I am not safe,” said Lalana.
Channick found something to be optimistic about in the statement, damning as it sounded. Her face lit up. “Great! Can you tell me how?”
“I have been captured by the Federation.”
“Not ‘safe’ as in ‘endangered,’” Hasimova clarified, identifying the issue and adjusting translation to compensate. “‘Safe’ as in ‘not dangerous.’”
After a brief discussion about the nuances of the language being used, Lalana revised her answer to, “I am not dangerous.”
“Maybe not you directly, but there might be microorganisms on you... I guess we’ll spot-test some decon protocols.” Whatever danger Lalana might pose, Channick was equally determined not to harm the lului by subjecting her to any medical procedures that might be incompatible with her biology.
“I am microorganism-lulu.” The translator rendered the voice with no discernible change in tone, but it felt like Lalana was growing aggravated and sullen as a result of her ordeal.
Saru changed one of the sub-settings in the isolation field. Lalana sat up and began spinning her hands, her pupils dilating back to their previous width.
“Thank you! That is much better, individual whose name I do not know!”
The idea that this encounter was going to be the impetus for earning first contact certification suddenly seemed an entirely remote possibility to Saru. He had been in Lalana’s company for over twenty minutes and failed to introduce himself. “I am Lieutenant Junior Grade Saru.”
“Then I am pleased to meet you, Lieutenant Junior Grade Saru. And what are your people called?”
“I am a Kelpien.”
“I have never met a Kelpien before. Your people must not be very good hunters.” Her tongue clicked.
Saru registered the clicks as another agitation response, likely a result of Lalana recalling her experience being hunted. Lului might not be prey in an evolutionary sense, but in a broader sense, they had this condition in common with Kelpiens. Saru’s shoulders softened in sympathy. “I think you will find our species have many things common.”
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.
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
<< Epilogue: God Only Knows
I realize there may only be a couple dozen people out there who have made it this far, and two of them are my parents, but if you are reading this, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking this journey with me and letting me show you my captain. I know he did things that are entirely unforgivable, that the circumstances cannot completely justify those actions, that he was as massively imperfect as a human can be, but I still love him.
I never set out to save him. I just wanted to tell his story and make sure he didn't die alone. I only saved him because there was no wiggle room in the way they showed his death. I thought they would blow up a ship with him upon it, a poetic mirror to the Buran, and I would happily place someone standing there beside him in that explosion in a spot the camera did not see, but there was no room in the picture they gave us.
So I found a workaround. Perhaps I have committed a cardinal sin of fandom, but I did it without compromising my integrity as a writer: every detail that went into creating the ultimate solution was already established either in this fanfic or in the show prior to the airing of Lorca's death in episode 13. (The most critical piece, null time, was miraculously posted the day before.)
There are still unanswered questions. Why was Mischkelovitz so certain she knew the solution? Was she right? What was the particle ray she used on the spores that turned them green? Did she succeed in what she was doing or die for nothing? If she transported Lorca as she intended, does he have all his appendages, or did she miss a few fingers and toes?
What was the friendship between Lalana and Saru like? Null time is easy enough to understand, but why, why, why the Triton? And why, John Allan, why did you do any of it, really?
What happened to everyone in the main timeline?
I intend to answer these questions. Not with another 400k word behemoth, with something much (much, much, MUCH) smaller and more focused. I don't need to rehash the events of this story, but I would like to show you the ultimate fate of the timeline and everyone in it. The version of the story Allan lived, the one that more perfectly aligns with the screen, the version that explains how this story came to be and how both stories end.
I also intend to record this story as an audiobook because most of what's written here, I spoke aloud as it was being written with voices for every character and I'd like to preserve that and allow anyone who wants to hear the story the same way I did as I wrote it.
I would like to thank a few of my favorite people: Allan (as John Allan), Gunvald (as Einar Larsson), Iam (as Milosz Mieszała), Sally (as Sollis), Zia (as Caxus), Mary (as Aeree), Greg (as Sarah Billingsley), Rana (as Da Hee Yoon), Will (as John Groves), and especially my brother, occasional cowriter, and better-or-worse half Simon (as Macarius O'Malley). Lastly, effusive thanks to Bonnie for copyediting, and eternal appreciation to the man who should've been captain for giving me a few pieces I was missing.
I must also apologize to crew of the Buran. Da Hee, Reiko, Arzo, Ak'vek'mov, Levy, Carver, and more. I fell in love with you guys. I'm so sorry your fates were preordained. In some alternate universe, you're all alive and well. Da Hee and Reiko are raising their son, Arzo and Levy have their own commands, Ak'vek'mov is conducting a lului medical survey with the full consent of the lului, and Carver is flying starships with a pot of coffee brewing nearby. You were all amazing and I miss you. Every time I relive your adventures, it's like you're alive again. In that sense, you'll never die. Maybe you'll even turn up again in some other stories.
The characters, you see, are still alive in our imaginations and I have no intention of letting them fade away from mine any time soon.
Same as now I can say, in some sense, captain, you'll live on. In some universe out there you're still alive.
A/N: This is being posted almost back-to-back with Chapter 102.
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
<< 102 - Only Then Am I Free
They took his things and brought him to a room with two chairs and one table. It was the sort of bland, nondescript place they took people ripped from time to interview them, devoid of any markers that would say where and when the room existed. He had brought people to such rooms before himself, but now that he was on the receiving end of this treatment as he waited for the operational director to arrive, John Allan was not sure what to think. (Was there an irony in the fact a time traveler might wait for anything while sitting in the heart of an organization that could pierce the currents of time as easily as an arrow slices through the air? Or was this simply the nature of the now?)
He slowly paced back and forth by the door rather than sit, trying to sort everything out in his head. He felt like he had been used and he was strangely glad for it. He had no love for Gabriel Lorca, but after spending all those years in the past, he considered many of the people he had met there to be his friends. Especially Emellia with her happy nonsense and Milosz with his funny little hums and bouncing excitement, the two of them in perfect sync together; they were like family to him. Family he would never see again except in historical recordings or holographic simulation. Macarius had been so kind, and Michael Burnham every bit as spectacular as her legend. He even missed Einar's deep, booming voice, enduring disdain for responsibility, and constant dry annoyance.
The door opened and he looked up to see who it was. He had to adjust his gaze downward; the figure who entered was half as tall as he expected.
Despite having come the long way, she looked very much the same. Her filaments seemed a little longer somehow and her eyes a slightly paler and yellower a shade of green. She was wearing a flowing, semi-transparent shawl garment with an insignia upon it: a rank insignia that far outstripped his own. Her voice was more confident, more sedate. "Congratulations on the success of your mission, Lieutenant Commander Allan. It is very nice to see you again. I apologize that you were not told the full specifics of your mission and its importance. But we could not have you know information which would jeopardize the mission at the time."
Allan sat down, partly because he had to. "You..."
"That is right. I am the one who chose you for this mission, a mission I knew only you could do, and a mission I knew you would succeed in, because I had already seen you do it. Come. Would you like some tea?" She summoned a tray and deftly poured him a cup with her tail.
He needed the tea, and badly. She clicked her tongue at the way his hands clung to the cup.
"Now that your mission is done, mine is as well. I wanted to personally thank you for everything you did before I leave. I have been running this organization for many years now, and in that time, few agents have succeeded in their tasks as well as you."
There was no hiding the shock. "Wait, you're the OD?" The Operational Director, a rumor in the hallways, a guiding hand that chose the missions and the operatives with a perspective longer than any other, with an identity kept secret to prevent temporal assassination.
She clicked her tongue again. "But of course. I founded the organization!"
"Then..."
"Yes, that is correct. I encountered you in the year 2256, and it was from that encounter that I confirmed time travel was possible. It took many centuries for the technology to develop, and piece by piece, I collected it all. It led to what you see here. The product of the minds of a thousand different worlds and generations, a tremendous power we must safeguard to preserve the flow of history.
"Though, you had a hand in the events of 2247 as well, didn't you? I could see your particle signature when I first met Captain Lorca. It is interesting to think that, prior to the interference you caused at Dr. Mischkelovitz's request, I had a completely different reason to found this organization, because I must have sent you in the original timeline, too. I think perhaps I did it for her the first time. In a way, Emellia outlives us all."
She did something with her tail. Something plinked out onto the table. A silver holodisc.
"This is yours to do with as you wish," she said.
Allan stared at the disc, realizing the truth. He was supposed to have done what he did, then. When they had led him to this empty room, he had half-expected it to be for the purposes of disciplining him for disrupting the timeline. Stripping him of his rank and throwing him in a prison from which no one could escape. He was relieved to find this was not the case. He picked up the holodisk and held it in his fingers. There was nothing left for him to do with it but keep it with him, a memento of a friend.
If Lalana noticed Allan's thought process play out on his face, she made no note of it. "But I am glad you are back now. I have been waiting more than eight hundred years for my task to be done. Perhaps 'waited' is not the best word. I have seen and done so many things over the centuries. I found Dr. Li's Section 31. I rescued lului from all across the quadrant who were kept prisoner and worse. I found the makers of Captain Lorca's sphere ship. I removed Umale's tether between the universes and stopped the temporal saboteurs who would have removed from history the whole of the Federation. I have met more species than you could even imagine and traveled farther than you can dream. And yet, in all the sights I have seen, there is but a single sight that has always been my favorite.
"That is why it is time for me to leave. It is up to you now, Mr. Allan, to safeguard the past, the present, and the future. I wish you much luck with this task."
Allan put the teacup back down on the table. "Wait, what? That's it? You're done?"
"Yes, that is correct. I have done what I set out to do, and I am now finally able to make the death of my own choosing. Please report to Director Isis for your next assignment. Thank you again, Mr. Allan. You'll never know what you've given me."
There was a tremendously bright light. Lorca's hand closed around something. It was another hand. Not a human hand, a blue one, with four fingers.
He gasped and looked up. What he saw amazed him as much as it terrified him. "What are you—"
Everything was frozen around them as if suspended in time. All the horror, all the rending, all the death. Plumes of fire and sparks of electricity hung in the air. The faces of his crew, contorted. It was a tapestry of silent destruction. There was Lieutenant Commander Levy, who would have made a great captain, mouth open and face determined. There, Morita being tended by her adoring wife, Yoon, who had risked everything so that they would be together and was now paying the ultimate price. Matthew Kerrigan, his arm shielding his face as the conduits behind his console exploded.
And here, standing right in front of him, was Lalana.
"Hayliel," she said, "it is so good to finally see you again!"
He embraced her. "How?" he choked out, drawing back so he could look into her giant green eyes. The very eyes he had named a star for.
"There is not enough time to tell you. Even if I had a thousand more years, there would not be."
He brushed his hands across her fur, a feeling he had missed so much for so many months. Tears sprang to his eyes. "Daisy, the baby—" That was why he had called her here, but now it was too late. He looked at Morita and Yoon, frozen together.
"I am sorry, Hayliel. I did not make it in time. I wish I could have done that for you. I wish I could have saved them the way you saved me."
His head shook back and forth. "But, you're here..." He could see there was a difference in her. He knew her well enough to realize she had aged. "Why are you here?"
"I have journeyed very far and very long in order to have the death of my own choosing. I have seen so many stars, Hayliel, and all of them thanks to you. The worlds, the people, the beauty, the wonderment! And in all that time, and in all those many years, there is one thing that I never found. And that is anyone that I love as much as you. Your face is my favorite thing in all the stars." She had had many years to work out exactly what to say to him. Centuries, in fact.
He inhaled shakily. He had not had those same centuries, but he knew what to say all the same because for him, the memory of her was still fresh in his mind. "Then go back. Get out of here, Lalana. I—" He swallowed. "I would rather a universe with you in it! So long as you're out there, I—" He gasped as the tears escaped down his face. That was why he had been so cruel to her, tried to push her away and out of this war entirely.
She brushed his tears away with her tail, cupping his cheek. "There is no me without you. There hasn't been since the moment we met." It could have meant that she would have died had it not been for their fateful first encounter, and it did, but it also meant so much more. "You will always be the man with stars in his eyes to me, Gabriel. You are my tears and my heartbeat. I do not want death to part us. I wish for it to be the last thing we do together. I love you, Hayliel Lorla. I love you more than anything else in existence. To me, there is no greater sight than you, and there is no one I would rather die alongside."
He smiled through the tears. "Lalana." The surrounding debris began to shudder and hiss and groan as the temporal stasis field weakened. He said the three words he had never been able to say before and wrapped his arms around her, never to let go again. Her tail encircled him and her filaments engaged with the surface of his skin. They were one as the world around them erupted, the stasis field collapsed, and the Buran exploded.
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
<< 101 - The Memory of Your Heart
Epilogue - God Only Knows >>
As she stepped off the shuttle onto the surface of Luluan for the first time in twenty-five years, Lalana's filaments rippled at the sensation of the words on the wind. There were many worlds with scents on the air and other species who used pheromones as communication, but nowhere else with quite the same combination of informational smells as Luluan.
The call for the gathering was already thick in the air. She had timed their arrival perfectly. The comet that measured the years of the planet was a brilliant streak of blue-white across the sky. Lalana's companion emerged from the shuttle beside her and inhaled the heady scent of the air. It was, to him, an indescribable perfume totally devoid of any meaning. He could smell trees but nothing else he understood, even if on some level the pheromones registered.
"So this is Luluan."
His hair was silver now, his face covered with many more wrinkles, but he still had the same impossibly blue eyes and a face that shifted far too easily and drastically and always betrayed the things he felt to those around him. His long black duster coat swept the deck of the shuttle as he stepped down onto the dirt.
The planet was not what he expected. Having lived so long on stories of it, the surface was largely unremarkable save for the few giant trees in the distance. Most of the magic lay underground—a magic forbidden to him by the planet's very nature. At least he had the stories. That was more than anyone else did.
Something like a slip of brown paper danced upon the wind above them. It folded, dropped, and snapped open again quickly enough that it caught the air before it plummeted entirely. Then it drifted easily down the remaining distance, revealing an old and faded Shkef whose membranes were now stretched thin with age and did not fully retract.
"You," said Serot. "Gade... Gaydli?"
"Gabriel," offered Lorca, registering vaguely annoyed amusement at the fact the other Lorca had failed to make enough of an impression for Serot to remember his name. "It's Omen now. I changed it."
The parallel was not lost on Serot. "My name was changed as well, but you may still address me as Serot."
Not that Lorca ever had; Serot was another thing he knew only from a story.
"How have your years been on Luluan?" asked Lalana.
"Many skymice have been prey to me, and also lului. As a... diversion, not for hunting to kill."
"You were always our favorite of the killing hunters," offered Lalana. "And among the best. In all the many years of hunting, I would say there were only two better."
"Thank you. I have heard the same. Come, Umale is waiting."
They were near the entrance to the cave. The geothermic stability of the planet meant Lorca was witnessing a view almost entirely identical to what the other Lorca had seen, but with the added benefit of dim flashlight, they reached the springs much more quickly.
The bioluminescent bacteria were beautiful, a softly shining carpet of light. Four lului were lounging around the area. They looked at Lorca for a long moment, then conversed between themselves in voices too quiet for the translator to pick up. Lorca watched a green lului ripple its filaments before diving into the water. A purple and a cream-white lului followed in rapid succession. The last lului, striped red and white, remained where it was on the far side of the water, watching.
"I will come back as soon as I am able," promised Lalana, diving in.
Lorca knelt down and dipped his hand into the water. It felt comfortingly warm, like a womb. His joints were a constant annoyance these days and he eagerly shed his clothes. "Join me?" he asked Serot.
"Shkef do not swim," she said, remaining standing far from the water at the edge of the bacterial bloom. Even the humidity of the area was unpleasant to her. The sense of moisture on her membranes made her feel weighed down and heavy.
Eventually another lului arrived from somewhere in the deep, this one ombre shades of grey to black. It clustered near the red one and joined the observation. Lorca fixed the pair of lului with a dry frown that neither lului knew the meaning of.
Lorca was taken almost completely by surprise when a lului arrived from the cave entrance. This one was orange. "Captain Lorca," it said on approach, then stopped and straightened. "No. You're not Lorca. Your particles are... mixed. That explains it, then."
"Explains what?"
"The missive on the wind not to eat the darkness."
The space between the stars. Lorca's personal particle aberration. All the lului could see it, of course, Lalana was not special in that regard. After fifteen years in this universe, most of the atoms that made up Lorca's body were entirely typical in their signature, but his eyes gave him away. The inner lens cells were the same ones he had been born with.
"I am Linali," said the orange lului. "Who are you?"
"Omen."
"And the Captain Lorca?"
"Couldn't say," said Lorca. He doubted any story told on Luluan would ever escape to history, but after so many years, he had no wish to retell it or relive it or even remember it.
Eventually another lului emerged from the water. It seemed to be the same cream-white lului from earlier. "Umale requests you proceed to the merge in your... ship. I am to escort you."
Linali accompanied them to the shuttle but did not step aboard. "When you have seen one Great Merge, you have seen them all," he said, clicking his tongue. The cream-white lului also clicked its tongue; apparently this constituted some form of lului joke.
There was no amused tongue-clicking as the lului stepped onto the shuttle to direct them. Immediately its knuckles began to knock and its fur to writhe. This action did not cease for the entire duration of the brief trip and when the shuttle landed, the lului shot off like a rocket and balled up on the ground outside the door, writhing down into the dirt for comfort. Serot trailed after it and waited until it had recovered its wits.
They were at the base of one of the great trees. Viewed up close it was tremendously impressive. Some of the branches were big enough that he could have landed the shuttle on them had they not been occupied by thousands of lului perched in a patchwork of random colors and patterns.
Beside the giant tree lay a vast field of moss, a hundred and fifty meters across and at least twice that in length. There were more lului in the trees off at the edges of the moss clearing forming a mass of visual noise in the gaps between the tree branches.
Their lului guide stood and augmented its cream-white base with stripes of red across its head and shoulders, then said, "Please stay back. It may be dangerous." It directed them to remain near the shuttle with its tail.
Four green and white lului with nearly identical patterns of black dots and stripes strode out to four points across the mossy surface. "As we die, so we live," they said in unison. The phrase was repeated back in an absolute cacophony of noise from the surrounding lului. It was a trilling hum of lului syllables that shook Lorca to his bones and far surpassed the translator's ability to compensate for the sound. Lorca realized he had never heard Lalana speak lului without the translator and that this was how it sounded.
The lului atop the moss began to vibrate in a way that made the moss around them resonate in harmony. The vibration spread across the surface of the moss. Suddenly it was as if a disruptor had fired: the moss exploded into a mist of green-grey dust and the lului vanished from view.
An absolute waterfall of lului came plummeting down from the tree branches above. It was a river of color dense enough to create a dark, blurry shadow in the air, obscuring the sight of the sky and the trees beyond. As they fell, a flood of lului poured out across the ground from between the trees, rushing forward with abandon to the edge of what Lorca realized was a massive pit. He resisted the urge to peer over the edge; the plummeting lului were not all exact in their paths of descent. They fell without regard for their own survival, some impacting against the pit's edge, shattering their internal structures. Those who failed to complete their dives were pulled in by the lului streaming in from the sides.
The minutes ticked by. The river slowed to a stream, then a trickle. Once there was no risk of being struck by a falling lului, their escort took Serot's hand with its tail and drew her forward. Lorca moved with them to the edge. He saw a mass of melting colors in the pit, thousands of shades dissolving into a reddish-grey soup. There had to be ten thousand lului down there. He wondered if this scene was being played out at every other giant tree on the planet.
"May the winds guide you," said the lului to Serot.
"Thank you, Lelleli," said Serot, diving off the edge. She swooped down to the middle of the mass and landed on top of it like a sheet of falling paper. A moment later she was subsumed.
Lelleli began to walk off. "Hey!" Lorca shouted at it, throwing up his hands for explanation. The lului did not understand the gesture. "Now what?"
"You wait," said Lelleli. It began to climb the tree and was soon beyond Lorca's reach.
It was dismally peaceful and quiet. Lorca ate a meal of rations from the shuttle and waited, reading a new book Simi had recommended to pass the time. Several dozen lului were scattered around the edges of the pit, watching and waiting as he was. The dim red sun shifted noticeably in the sky as the hours wore by. Lorca was nearing the end of the book when the first of the lului began to emerge from the pit.
They came out small and grey, their eyes big green discs as their heads swiveled to take in the sight of a world at once both new and old. The lului at the edges of the pit approached the new ones and pressed their bodies close, wrapping epithelial tendrils together as they lallened. The new lului sometimes shifted colors in response. After a few moments, the new lului moved off away into the trees and the sentinels repeated the procedure with the next lului to emerge near them. It seemed to be some sort of welcoming or imprinting of information.
One of the new lului came straight towards Lorca. It had already chosen a color for itself: navy blue with a fleshy tone head and chest and a silver chevron shape over its left breast.
"I am Wallulen," it said.
"Are you now," said Lorca, putting his padd down and frowning at the creature.
"I was named for one of your species."
"Yep."
"Then you know him?"
Lorca considered the question. He had known a Walter Chen, a brutal and petty man who had been executed by Lorca's own hand over a bet gone awry with his universe's Levy. "No, but I hear he made a mean frittata."
"I will remember that," said Wallulen, not that he knew what a frittata was, or why someone would make one which was not nice.
"You do that," said Lorca, biting back laughter as he watched the new lului wander off to the tree line.
"That was not very kind," said a familiar voice to Lorca's left. Lalana had snuck up from behind the shuttle during the exchange.
"I could've said something a lot worse," pointed out Lorca. "How was the meeting?"
There was something subtly different about Lalana, the way she was carrying herself. "It was..." Normally, words spilled out of her like a fountain, but she seemed to be at a loss. "We should go."
Lorca put his padd down and gave her a look. "Seriously? We came all this way and you're not gonna tell me what for?"
Lalana's fur began to writhe. "It is a lului concern."
"Fine, keep your secret," huffed Lorca, deciding he would get the truth from her at a later date.
He tried several times to do just that in the many years that followed. Casually, intensely, with bribery, bargaining, enticements, tricks, and threats. "I'm leaving if you don't tell me," he said, which then became, "I'll come back if you tell me." Soon it was, "Look, I came back, you can trust me. Just tell me. I won't tell anyone else."
Then, finally: "You're never gonna tell me," he rasped at her when his breaths were old and tired and he felt like a piece of butcher paper carried aloft on the wind and knew his days were numbered as surely as they had ever been in the years he had spent alongside Georgiou.
She brushed her tail through the snowy white of his hair and said the same thing as always. "It is a lului concern."
"I don't want to die with secrets between us," he said, which was as sincere a request as it was one last attempt to pry the truth out of her.
"There have always been secrets between us," she said. "But equally, you know all the most important truths."
Though the rest of him had faded, his eyes were still the most brilliant shade of blue. She told him this. A smile tugged at his lips. "Show me the color." He marveled at how accurately her fur reflected the striations of the human iris. Then he closed his eyes. "Now tell me a story. Your favorite one."
There was only one story she had never told him in all their years together. It seemed right to finally share it with him now.
"In the year 1866, the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by an inexplicable phenomenon," she began. He sighed happily and listened as Pierre Aronnax, Conseil, Ned Land, and Captain Nemo came to life again, the way characters do every time their story is read anew.
This time, Lorca did not hear how the story ended.
It was better that way. With the end untold, the Nautilus would never encounter the calamity of the Maelstrom. It would instead drift forever through the vast and dreamlike seas under the command of its infamously mysterious captain: a never-ending adventure of wonders and exploration through an inky blackness filled with schools of tiny, shining fish. An ocean as infinite as a sky full of stars.
A/N: There is a scene referenced in this chapter that took place in episode 15 and was not included in this fanfic. Just want to make sure the non-show watchers know they didn't miss anything I wrote; the scene didn't really fit in this story except as a moment of reminiscence. If you rewatch this scene with a mind towards the context it's presented here, though, it really is pretty unnerving.
I'm at the big Star Trek convention in Vegas if anyone wants to drop me a line.
Also, hey, did you catch that the titular captain is Saru? Yep. Planned that one from day one. He ended up with a different secret than originally intended because Lorca lived, but it was Saru all along.
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
<< 100 - The Captain’s Secret
102 - Only Then Am I Free >>
The lobby of the opera house was stunning. Swirl-patterned windows rose three and a half stories tall with terraced levels of curving wood and white walls that caught the reflected light of the moonscape outside. Blue and purple plants native to Vorasa system cascaded down like a waterfall of life from the top level, weaving down towards the garden on the first level with bursts of orange and green flowers.
"This is incredible," breathed Tilly, barely able to catch her breath at the sight of it.
Next to her, Stamets was more concerned with the tickets. He smacked his hand twice on the side of the holoticket and the seat numbers fritzed into view along with live directions to reach them. "There we go."
"Couldn't you just live here? If there were beds, I mean, and..." She trailed off, uncertain what else living in a space this immense would require.
"It is stunning," admitted Stamets. There was a time when he might have come here and found the architecture preferable to the music. Now he felt capable of appreciating both.
"Wow," said Tilly, head tilted up towards the ceiling, her feet following the movement of her eyes across a series of rippling metal ribbons arranged along the ceiling. There was a soft impact as she backed into another guest, almost tripping over the trailing hem of a gown. The Bolian she had collided with turned to look at her with wide-eyed surprise. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking—"
The Bolian smiled at Tilly. "It's fine," the woman assured her, sweeping the shimmery, peacock purple fabric of her floor-length gown to the side. "Your first time?"
"Yes," Tilly nodded, excitement overcoming her fluster.
"Enjoy your visit," said the Bolian kindly and resumed her conversation with her companion.
Stamets watched the exchange with a smile of his own. "Making new friends everywhere we go," he gently teased. "Shall we find our seats?" They followed the instructions on the ticket to the middle terrace level and the far left of the auditorium. The theatre itself was shallow but tall—as tall as the lobby—with multiple levels of seating stacked almost on top of one another so every seat had a view of the stage, with the preference being for the audience to be above the performers but a stone's throw back, rather than deep and far away as most theatres on Earth. Elegant scalloping behind the stage directed the sound from the base up towards the top. At the moment, the sound consisted of a gentle, whispering murmur of patrons seeking seats and the orchestra members taking their places, punctuated by notes of instrument tuning,
"We're so high up," said Tilly, feeling slightly queasy. It was impossible not to feel a momentary sense of acrophobia. The theatre was the polar opposite of Discovery's low, modest ceilings and the scalloped back wall of the room created the illusory sensation of leaning over the stage below in a mild optical illusion.
"At least we're not on the front row," said Stamets, because merely standing at the front row of any section was enough to create the sensation of teetering at the edge of a cliff. Species prone to inner ear imbalances like humans were advised to avoid those seats entirely.
They took their seats, Stamets smart in his tuxedo and Tilly looking the picture of elegance in a long black dress and attached capelet. Her red curls were pulled back into a ponytail big enough to be a halo. Stamets listened to the whisper in the air and for a moment it felt like he might hear Culber if he listened closely enough. "Thank you for doing this with me."
"I'm honored you invited me," said Tilly, consulting her program.
The conductor arrived to brief fanfare. As the lights dimmed and the stage came to life, a triumph of horns and flutes played their spirited invitation to the world of Puccini's La Bohème and were joined almost immediately by the voices of the performers.
The notes floated upwards through the air. The movements of the singers were balletic when viewed from above, carefully choreographed to suit the swirling aesthetics of classical Kasseelian culture, and Tilly was soon lost in the music even if she did not understand the exact words.
Stamets was lost in the music, too, but he could barely see the performers through the watery field of his eyes and soon closed them, imagining he was in another time and place with a different companion. He settled back against the plush velvety material of the seat and heard partly the music and partly the memory of Culber, his mind's eye picturing the doctor's smile and the brush of stubble across his jaw. The opera house was forgotten in favor of the soft blue lights of their shared quarters late at night. Moonlight settings they had called it, and the singing became a backdrop to a far more beautiful moment.
Stamets’ eyes only opened when the version of Culber in his mind said, "Come on, we're missing the show."
At intermission, they refreshed themselves with a pair of drinks as Tilly fretted about the wisdom of drinking at all. Taking a bathroom break while the performance was ongoing seemed a terrible social faux pas.
"You're overthinking," Stamets told her.
"You know what? I am!" She downed her drink in one go. "Whew!"
Tilly turned, looking across the crowd to see what else people did during opera intermissions besides imbibe alcohol and saw something on the far side of the terrace that made her face light up with recognition. "Is that..."
Stamets turned in the direction she was looking. Even across such a large room, it was hard to mistake the form of a lului as anything else and impossible to deny the familiar shade of grey-blue epithelial tendrils beneath the gossamer strands of the lului's semitransparent shawl. She was stretched up to the height of a human with the support of a cocktail table. Beside her stood a humanoid in a full environmental suit leaning with one arm on the table and the other on his hip, an angled black cape hiding the slight offense of the environmental suit's vulgarity against the sea of well-dressed operagoers.
"I think it is! Lalana!"
"Don't—" But it was too late. Tilly was already waving her arms to get Lalana's attention and the lului, with her massive eyes that took in whole vistas at a glance, had seen them first. Stamets felt his heart drop.
Approaching the table, Tilly was startled to find she recognized the alien's style of environmental mask. She had seen one exactly like it once before. "Hello Sylvia and Paul!" said Lalana. There were three empty drink tumblers on the table, though how many had gone to Lalana and how many her companion was unclear. (The answer, of course, was that none of the alcohol had gone to Lalana.)
"Fancy meeting you here," was Tilly's cheerful reply. "Who's your friend?"
"This is Omen. May I introduce Paul Stamets and Sylvia Tilly. They were with me during my time on Discovery."
"Pleasure," said Omen, his voice a low metallic timbre that seemed to hint at a darkly wry tone.
Stamets considered the masked figure. The height and build checked out. "I think we've met once before," he ventured. "You were with Lalana when she came to visit my research station the first time. Before Discovery."
There was no audible reply, but the masked figure tilted his head to the side and Stamets could well imagine the dry and disapproving frown.
"Was that where you got the idea?" asked Tilly. Lalana's head twisted in a manner indicating confusion. Tilly gestured to her own head to supply some visual context to supplement her verbal deficiency. "The—Memory Alpha."
"Why, yes," said Lalana. "Omen's species was the source of the design." She began clicking her tongue in a private joke. Lorca figured it out after a moment and shook his head with annoyance at the lameness of essentially saying the design was a human one.
The coincidence was too much. Stamets shot Lorca a sidelong glare. "What brings you here?"
"I am very much a fan of live music, especially singing," Lalana answered. "Gabriel and I used to attend concerts when we would visit Risa."
"Lorca liked opera?" said Stamets, incredulous.
"You're telling me people enjoy this caterwauling?" shot back Lorca, absolutely confirming his identity to Stamets.
"People with good taste," Stamets retorted, though Culber's love of opera had not been something they shared while the doctor was alive. It was only now that Culber was dead and the sound of opera brought him back to life in Stamets' mind that the engineer found he could appreciate the genre fully. "I wouldn't think this would be of interest to... someone like you."
"Likewise," was the response from under the mask. Tilly reacted with momentary surprise at hearing the word, which she associated with O'Malley.
Lalana was untroubled by the tenseness between Lorca and Stamets and said, "I am enjoying it very much!"
"Me, too!" bubbled Tilly, launching into an excited discussion of the specifics with Lalana that lasted until the lights flashed to signal the end of intermission, another one of those Earth customs that had successfully migrated across the Federation as an easily understandable universal cue.
Lalana's presence Stamets could almost understand, but he seriously wondered what Lorca had been doing there. Thankfully, when he and Tilly returned the following year for what soon became an annual pilgrimage, Lorca and Lalana were both blissfully absent.
2259.
They had unleashed a monster into the galaxy. Philippa Georgiou, every bit the bloodthirsty, murderous, opportunistic tyrant she had always been, spent the first few months learning the ins and outs of the universe she had landed in, playing along with the charade requested of her by Starfleet, and when she was satisfied she had enough of an understanding of her circumstances and her enemies, she left a trail of corpses in her wake that sent a ripple of fear across the whole of the Federation.
For the first few weeks after the initial refugee camp massacre, no one suspected it was her. It was not until the massacre repeated in another system, on another planet, that the rumors began to swirl across subspace of a great Starfleet captain gone inevitably insane after a full year of Klingon prison.
Then the rumors shifted subtly, the fringes of the story changing as a new version emerged. Georgiou was not insane, they said, but rather, the sanest person in the universe. She had seen the truth of what was required in the wake of the Klingon conflict and hers was not a way of madness but of strength: a galactic necessity if they were to prevent the Klingons from reorganizing against them in the future.
The Federation, these rumors further claimed, was being taken advantage of by the Klingons and various non-member states. The aid being offered to others was not being returned with anything of value and non-citizen refugees were illegally flocking to Federation worlds, straining resources already depleted by the recent war and taking what rightfully belonged to the Federation's full, legal citizens.
Georgiou was like a virus, her actions and ideas a contaminant, but this time, her contamination had spread far beyond Cornwell, Sarek, and the other wartime leaders who had approved her hydro bomb proposal in the waning days of the war.
Some flocked to this bold legend, exactly as Georgiou knew they would, because they saw the recent Klingon conflict as a sign of things to come and they longed for the authoritarian strength of someone who would crack down on the Federation's enemies in every way possible.
Others retaliated to this evolution of the narrative by doubling down on the claims of insanity. There could be no other explanation for a mental break so total, so complete, and so bloodthirsty.
A further subset of the population saw this new version of Georgiou as proof of the dangers posed by humans and their viral genetic instability and wondered if perhaps the solution to the problem was something else entirely.
Then there were those who knew the truth of who and what Georgiou truly was.
"You must track her down," ordered Admiral Sherak. "You are the only crew who understands what we are dealing with."
"Yes, admiral," Saru agreed, but after three weeks they were no closer to stopping Georgiou and the death toll had risen to seventy-two. Saru and Burnham were forced to confront the fact their knowledge of this universe's original Philippa Georgiou was not translating into an understanding of the Terran emperor.
In the ready room, Burnham standing across the table from him and a fresh cup of salted tea between them, Saru decided it was time to consider a more drastic measure. "Perhaps it takes a Terran to track a Terran," he mused.
Petrellovitz's little behavioral experiment—approved by Sarek at the time of its proposal—had lasted only seven months on Discovery. In the end, it was not Petrellovitz's lack of morals and systematic disregard for experimental safeties that had doomed the venture, it was Michael Burnham's enduring tendency to regard herself as knowing better than everyone around her and correlating habit of inserting herself into every aspect of ship missions and operations under the auspices of this assertion.
Put another way, Petrellovitz could not get along with this universe's Michael Burnham, and Burnham equally did not get along with her. Petrellovitz was used to a version of Burnham that relied on her for science, not one that tried to tell her how to run her own projects. The two were constantly at odds with one another in a way that went far beyond the rivalry Burnham and Saru had been locked into back on the Shenzhou.
They might have continued in this battle of wills indefinitely but Burnham and Petrellovitz were both too clever for that and had come to the mutual conclusion they simply needed to be on different ships. That, thought Saru, was an exemplary conclusion to the experiment that reflected well on both of them. Petrellovitz had since transferred to the USS Lemaître, where she was now a chief science officer.
"I mean, I can help you, but you should ask Omen," Petrellovitz told them over the holocomm. "Keeping tabs on the emperor was never really my thing." Her thing had been the opposite, avoiding the emperor at all costs.
That was what Saru had been afraid of. It seemed there was no way around it in the end. "I assume you can still contact them?"
Petrellovitz hummed and bounced slightly. Being in this universe had revealed an irreverent edge to her personality that had never been able to fully manifest in the mirror universe. "I can. Mac likes to hear from his sister every now and again. In return, I'd like the full, unredacted mission report from your recent jaunt on Nirros V and detailed scans of the next five magnetars you encounter. I'll send my specifications."
"I agree to your terms." Nirros V was more a curiosity than anything else. The incident was not classified, but several personnel details had been purged to protect the privacy of those involved, piquing Petrellovitz's interest. Saru knew she would keep the salient details to herself. She might even reply to him with some insights into how the crystalline entity had caused the polarity instability in the transporter stream.
"What do you think this means for our old experiment?" Petrellovitz wondered aloud.
"It means all Terrans are different," said Burnham, "same as all humans." Petrellovitz smiled at Burnham and terminated the call.
"Send Petra a copy of our Nirros V report as soon as possible," ordered Saru, but Burnham could not leave until she had asked one more question.
"Who or what is Omen?"
"That information is highly sensitive. There is still a chance they will not respond to our request. If they do not, then there is no need for me to tell you."
Four hours later they had coordinates for a rendezvous and Saru was forced to reveal the truth. The look of horror on Burnham's face made clear she interpreted this as a betrayal. "I saw his body."
"What you saw was Einar Larsson. A gruesome ruse on Lalana's part, assisted by Mr. Groves."
Burnham shook her head, still reeling from the shock. "The Lorca I knew would never have been able to lie low this long." In her ideation of Lorca, he was a self-aggrandizing, egotistical manipulator who had thrust himself to the forefront of the Federation's war with the sole intent of using that mythos to schism and conquer the Federation once the Terran Empire was under his sway. At least, that was what she had to believe to justify the way she had watched Georgiou stab him through the chest. Sometimes she still saw his face in her dreams, his eyes twisted with pleading desperation as he reached towards her.
"Perhaps you did not know him as well as you thought," suggested Saru.
"How could they keep this from me?"
Saru sighed in almost human fashion. "I know it has always been a great difficulty for you to 'put yourself in another's shoes,' but I implore you, attempt to do so now. There was no benefit to telling you this. A decision was made by persons higher-ranking than either of us that Lorca's existence must be kept secret. It was my duty to abide by it."
"You know how he was—is obsessed with me."
"I am your captain," said Saru, but warmly, in a tone that felt like a knowing smile, because theirs was now a long friendship centered around mutual respect. "Captains must be able to keep secrets. I have not held many, so I hope you will forgive me for the one. If I thought he posed any threat to you I would have told you regardless. If you do not wish to be present when he is, there is no need for you to see him."
"No," said Burnham, "I'm the first officer on this ship and I'm the reason Georgiou is here in the first place. This mission is more my responsibility than anyone's."
She was worried, though, what seeing him would do to them both.
They waited at the rendezvous point for hours. Even Saru began to doubt if anyone was coming. Then a small, V-shaped cruiser devoid of any identifying marks and with a disabled transponder dropped out of warp almost on top of them and requested to dock. Saru and Burnham waited at the airlock.
None of the three figures on the other side of the airlock were entirely familiar. There was a pale, yolky yellow lului with a splash of darker yellow on its chest and red on its hands, tail, and head. Beside it stood a humanoid in a black and grey environment suit and rebreather helmet with silver latches. A tall grey alien with long, raven-black hair and red eye slits dressed in a navy-blue gown brought up the rear of the group—a Misellian.
"Greetings, Captain Saru," said the lului. "I am Lolalen, and these are my companions Omen and Aeree."
"Changed my mind," remarked the helmeted alien beside the lului in a metallic voice, turning on his heel.
"Captain!" said Burnham. The helmeted figure paused mid-stride. There was a chance that word had not been for him, but Burnham could imagine he wanted it to be.
"Perhaps we should convene in the conference room to discuss the specifics," suggested Saru.
Once the doors were closed and the official record disabled, all pretext was dropped. Lalana shifted back to her usual blue-grey and Lorca hesitantly removed his helmet. There were streaks of silver peppered throughout his hair and the years had crinkled some new lines onto his face, but the eyes were the same.
He did not hold Burnham's gaze. Half a second after their eyes met he looked away, focusing instead on the polished sheen of the conference table, the objects on the side of the room farthest away from Burnham, and finally the stars outside the window as he went and stood there with his back to the assembly. When he spoke, he addressed and responded only to Saru and his crewmates, treating Burnham as if she were some sort of void in the room.
Burnham did not take her eyes off him. She could not understand his behavior.
"We don't need your help," Lorca declared. "We can get her on our own."
"Then why haven't you gone after her before now?" challenged Burnham. "I thought you hated the emperor."
Lorca's fingers twitched behind his back. Burnham could just make out the enduring frown of his reflection. "Why indeed," he sighed to no one in particular, as if her question had come drifting in through the window on some cosmic wind.
"Because there could not be any question as to who had killed her," said Lalana. "We will help you, but only if you leave us out of all reports, official and otherwise, and take all credit for stopping her."
Burnham was confused. "You don't want people to know it was you."
Truth be told, he had always been a self-aggrandizing, egotistical manipulator, and he still was, but he had been forced to temper this against the realities of living on the fringe.
"It would be counter to our role in the universe," said Lalana.
"I was addressing Lorca."
At last he spoke to her, but his eyes remained locked on the stars outside. "Then you're shit out of luck, Burnham, 'cause there is no Lorca. But if you want to put a line in there about the great and mighty Captain Omen, you be my guest."
"Omen," said Burnham. "As in a portent of fate. You haven't changed at all."
Lorca snorted so hard he got saliva in his nose. Burnham was entirely missing the trick to the name. He turned away from the window, keeping his back to Burnham, and addressed the Misellian sitting at the conference table. "Ree! You handle the specs." He grabbed his helmet from the table and stormed out.
"Let him go," Lalana advised Saru and Burnham. "He did not want to come."
Burnham looked at Lalana with pity for how little the lului knew about anything. "That may be what he wants all of us to believe, but that does not make it true. The Gabriel Lorca I remember was obsessed with me."
"Oh, Michael Burnham, it was not that he was obsessed with you, it was that he loved someone who had your face. And when you have lost someone you love, it is such a comfort to still be able to see their face."
The problem, Lorca informed them all once he had calmed down, was that they were trying to track Georgiou down. "You don't track Georgiou, you draw her out to you."
They knew roughly what region of space she was in. From there, it was a simple matter to falsify a set of refugee transfer records, disguise the stealth cruiser as a transport, and fabricate a distress signal for a fake engine emergency.
"Can't be subtle about it. She doesn't go for subtle. Whatever you put in that message, you gotta clobber her over the head with it."
"If it's too obvious, she'll see through it," said Burnham.
"Trust me," said Lorca to Saru. He was still pointedly avoiding looking at Burnham.
While the real refugees hitched a ride on Discovery to somewhere more welcoming than this region of space, Burnham and three of Discovery's security officers boarded the cruiser.
"Welcome aboard the Hayliel," said Lalana.
The ship was dark both inside and out. Its interior felt like being in a hole deep underground rather than the infinite reaches of space and the passages that made up the ship's veins were so narrow Burnham and her entourage could only walk in a single file. It was claustrophobic, dimly lit, and eerily quiet. It felt very Terran.
They arrived in the cargo bay and encountered a fourth crewmember: a young human woman who smirked up at them as she expertly cleaned and reassembled a rifle weapon. "The great Michael Burnham," said the woman, identifying herself as "Simi the Starkiller."
The security officers were permitted to wander the ship freely because, as Lalana said, "Anywhere that you are not allowed, you will not be able to enter." It was an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the layout of the ship and prepare for the coming trap.
Lorca was on the bridge, sitting in the captain's chair and gnawing on his finger in agitation. Burnham took up a position just off to his right, almost but not quite in his eyeline, and kept watch on him from the corner of her eye. He remained clearly displeased by her presence even if he was refusing to actively acknowledge her.
He was not the only one to take issue with the mission. "I am under no obligation to help with missions I do not agree with," said Aeree from what appeared to be an operations station. "That's not the deal. Give me the shuttle. I can still make the rendezvous with Jochrat and complete our objective."
Most humans would not have recognized what Lorca and Aeree were discussing, but Burnham had grown up on Vulcan and knew a Romulan name when she heard one. Exactly what had Lorca and his friends been up to?
"I'm amending the deal," said Lorca. "You want Mac to find out what you did to that cat? No? Well then, you're staying here."
Aeree said in a tone so cloyingly sweet it felt like it was dripping sugary ichor, "You cannot hold that over my head forever, Omen."
"You don't eat a man's cat!" Was that anger or exasperation in Lorca's voice? Burnham could not decide which.
"Even I know that, and I once ate a man," clicked Lalana from the helm controls.
Aeree hissed softly. "Very well, but you are warned," she said nebulously. Burnham was reminded of Lorca's time commanding Discovery. Then, as now, he had created a highly contentious ship environment. She failed to realize that this was a game to them all, and that it had been a game back on Discovery, too, with the sole difference that all the participants on the Hayliel knew they were playing. In time, Lorca would do something that Aeree could hold over his head and the balance of power would be restored between them and perhaps even tip in the Misellian's favor.
They waited. And waited. Lorca's agitation grew to a boiling point and Burnham felt it necessary to point out that the reason the ploy had not worked was likely him. "Our message was too obvious," she announced. "She realized it was a trap."
Lorca jumped up from the captain's chair and stormed out of the room.
"Why did you do that," Aeree hissed at Burnham. "Do you think Omen does not see that possibility?"
"It needed to be said," said Burnham.
Aeree's reply was unequivocally firm. "If everyone in a room knows something, it does not need to be said. You only say things when you think people need to know them and do not already. Do you think we were born yesterday, little Earth child, or that there is any thought in your head that has not already filtered through ours? What are you in the face of a thousand years of experience?"
"Ree, that's enough." Lorca had turned around almost immediately after leaving the bridge and heard most of the exchange from the entryway. "Burnham, with me."
The cruiser was not very big and there were few places to go. Burnham put a hand to the phaser on her hip as she trailed Lorca. She couldn't tell Lorca's mood completely from his back, but his voice was grimly resigned. "Sorry 'bout that. Aeree's a little protective. I'd say she's harmless, but... Her bark is entirely less than her bite."
"If you try anything, I will defend myself," Burnham warned.
Lorca did not respond. Their destination turned out to be a tiny mess hall, surprisingly bright compared to the rest of the ship, with white walls and silver fixtures. A silver table with bench seating took up most of the space. Lorca hit a switch just inside the door and the lights dimmed halfway, shifting the room from glaring white to a more neutral warm cream color he found tolerable. He slid past the table and plucked two cups from a storage cupboard. "When my Michael got tense, it was usually because she was getting peckish."
Burnham watched Lorca's shoulders as he poured coffee into the cups and rummaged for something to serve with it, settling on some sweet rolls. "I'm not your Michael."
"Ree's not wrong. When everyone knows something, sometimes it doesn't need to be said." He pushed one of the coffee cups towards her and sat down at the table.
At last they were sitting across from each other and it became clear the reason he had been avoiding her so thoroughly. He gazed at her with a mixture of melancholy, longing, and relief. A faint smile touched his lips.
This time, Burnham looked away. He sniffed in mildly derisive amusement at her discomfort. "So this is what it's come to. You hate me that much."
When their eyes met again, hers were steady and cold. "I barely think about you. You're nothing but a bad memory that I put behind me a long time ago."
He frowned in annoyance, a frown she remembered from seeing it many times on Discovery, and Burnham was glad; she knew hearing she never thought about him would hurt more than suggesting she possessed any emotion towards him at all. "After everything I did for you," he said, shaking his head. "Without me, you'd still be languishing in Federation prison. Your adopted dad'd be dead in the Yridia nebula, and you wouldn't be back in Starfleet serving as first officer on that ship. A ship I gave you. You ungrateful..." He grabbed his roll and bit off a large chunk, chewing on it angrily.
Burnham was shocked. "You expect me to thank you?" she realized.
He washed the roll down with a swig of coffee and sniped at her, "That'd be a start."
"After everything you did." Burnham shook her head.
"Because of it," he countered.
"You lied. To me, to Starfleet, to everyone."
"What was I supposed to do? You think if I'd waltzed up and said, 'I'm not from this universe,' they'd've given me a ship? I'd have been poked and prodded like a goddamn specimen. I only did what I had to do to get a command."
"You were using us to get back to your universe."
"As if!" He rolled his eyes. It had been the plan, and then it wasn't the plan, and then it was again. The plan had therefore existed in a state of Schrodinger-like uncertainty, both true and untrue, until events had forced it to become a last-ditch desperate effort to retain control of his own destiny. That was all he had ever wanted, really. Control for himself to make up for a life where he'd had none. "I just wanted to keep my goddamn ship." He sighed. "Maybe win that war for you. The right way."
"By bringing the Terran Empire here to 'save' us just so you could turn around and crush us beneath your heel and become emperor of two universes."
"Now that," said Lorca, "sounds like something the other you would've come up with. Maybe I could've managed it. Imagine, the might of two universes united, the possibilities." That was one way things could have played out and he would have been entirely satisfied to make it so. There was no denying it was a solution he had considered. "But if I had..."
If he had gone through with that course of action, he would have lost her. The only thing he had left of Michael. In the end, he'd lost her anyway, but at least it was not because he had intentionally set them down a path towards that inevitability.
"Then what was your plan?"
"Well, now you'll never know, will you."
Had he been feeling more generous, he might have told her his secret. There had never been one plan, there had always been twenty. His brilliance was in coming up with plan after plan so that in the moment, he could make the most of whatever fate had presented him in a way that seemed intentioned. He made the plans and fate chose among them.
Burnham glared at him as she sipped her coffee. Despite his denials, she felt she knew the truth. He was a liar and had always been.
Another sigh. "I didn't bring you in here for this. When I first became this universe's Gabriel Lorca, someone gave me a gift. A story. Funnily enough, a story was the gift I gave my Michael. It's time I gave you one, too."
A lie, she thought to herself, but the story he told felt true.
"I've got a scar on my back. From an agonizer, handheld. Spot where it is, can't quite reach it myself. Which is exactly what the person who put it there intended. She liked to put scars in that spot so her victims would have to debase themselves by asking for help to get rid of 'em. I even did a few times. I hated that scar so much. Every time I got rid of it, she'd put it right back. The last time she put it on my back was just before I came here. Now, I coulda had someone in this universe remove it the minute I arrived because no one here knows what the scar is or what it means, but I didn't. You know why?"
Burnham waited, sensing he did not require her to ask the question.
"She had the same scar on her back. My Michael. I swore I'd keep it until I took down the person who gave it to us both. So thank you, Burnham. It looks like now I finally get that chance."
Knowing that Georgiou was in the habit of marking people on their backs like chattel was disturbing but Burnham held herself firm and said coldly, "That doesn't excuse what you did. Georgiou told me how you groomed the other me."
Lorca's stare was uncharacteristically surprised. "Did she? That's funny. You ever think Pippa mighta been describing herself?"
Until this moment, Burnham never had, because she couldn't possibly imagine the original Captain Georgiou doing anything like that.
Then she remembered a moment before she, Georgiou, Tilly, and Tyler had beamed down to Qo'noS to deliver what turned out to be a hydro bomb. How Georgiou had lit up at the sight of Tilly, stroked her hair, called her "Killy" in a way that sounded like a personal pet name. A knot of revulsion formed in Burnham's stomach. "No. You tricked the other me."
"You don't give the other you enough credit. I couldn't make that girl do anything she didn't wanna do. You have that in common. And she... she always knew she had me wrapped around her little finger." Lorca smiled, his eyes faraway as he recalled his Michael. He had committed a cardinal sin where the other universe was concerned, just not the sin Burnham thought he had. Sins were defined a little differently for Terrans. "She was the one wanted to be emperor. I was just happy to help."
Burnham instantly saw the flaw in the logic he was offering. "She was the emperor's heir. She didn't need your help."
"You think she was Pippa's one and only? Georgiou was fickle and vindictive. Still is, thanks to you. Michael and I lasted longer than most. Didn't mean we were safe. So we took a gamble. Together." He closed his eyes. "I still see her sometimes. My Michael."
If only Burnham had stayed with him in the other universe and taken up the mantle of emperor. He wished he could have seen some version of Michael on that throne. His end goal had always been to remove Georgiou and replace her with someone who would not debase him, threaten his life constantly, and take away the things he loved. Someone who would allow him the autonomy to fly freely across the expanse of the stars. Michael had exceeded his expectation in every regard.
Aeree's voice came over the comms. "Omen, we detect them."
Lorca's eyes snapped open and he smirked confidently. "Time to put on a show."
At the show's conclusion, Georgiou was flat on her back in the middle of the Hayliel's cargo bay, pinned mostly beneath a cargo crate, with Lorca's boot on her wrist and a Romulan disruptor pistol aimed at her head. Burnham stared at this reversal of fortune with panic. "No!"
"King of the misfits," Georgiou said venomously, reviving an old nickname of Lorca's. In their universe, that was what he had been: leader of the aberrations who pursued things other than power. People like Matthew Kerrigan, Jackson Benford, and Emellia Petrellovitz. There were plenty around him who were there for power, but enough that weren't to earn them revulsion.
"Emperor of nothing," he responded.
"Do it," Georgiou hissed.
Burnham walked slowly towards Lorca, her hands outstretched in a plea, her own phaser set to stun. "There's no reason for us to kill her."
"She had her chance," said Lorca. "You really wanna give her another one, Michael?"
"Yes." A chance to go to Federation prison, but a chance nonetheless.
"You didn't give me a chance."
Burnham stopped. There were always signs, of course. Pahvo, the Yridia nebula, Corvan, his attempts to rescue, protect, and help her. Moments that to Burnham were obfuscated by his darkness, his cruelty, his contempt for the people around him, and his apparent obsession with her.
She raised her phaser into the air in a sign of peace. "I'm giving it to you now."
He holstered his disruptor and stepped away. At last, long last, Burnham could see who he was.
At the end of it all, Burnham made an offer she did not expect to make. "I cannot offer you what you had with your Michael, but... If you wish to communicate..."
"No. You've been talking to Lalana." He turned towards her, years of sadness reflected in his eyes. "You know what the worst thing in the universe is? Watching the face of someone you love turn against you. I look at you and I see..." His voice began to break. "You standin' there, staring at me... I just wanted one more moment with her. One last moment. I gave you back the stars and you wouldn't even give me that!"
She could see that moment, too. A terrified face, staring at her with shocked betrayal, falling to the floor with a wound worse than the physical hole in his chest.
"I don't want to see you. I don't wanna be near you. I wish I'd never—" But he couldn't finish that sentence because it wasn't true. "I wish things had been different. But I want you to know, I forgive you."
Burnham stared at him, confused.
"For thinking the worst of me."
2260.
"We are not far from Risa," said Lalana. "We should visit Sollis and Caxus. They have been asking to see you." As with Stamets and Tilly and that seemingly calculated encounter on the Kasseelian moon, Lorca was abiding by the strict rules set out by Starfleet. He scrupulously avoided contacting anyone from his time on Discovery or the other Lorca's life.
Lalana had made no such agreement. When O'Malley mentioned where Tilly and Stamets were headed, Lalana brought Lorca to give him the chance to antagonize Stamets one last time as a small consolation gift. Also because, as much as Lorca loved pushing Stamets' buttons, he still liked Stamets in his own way.
The thought of visiting Risa made Lorca uncomfortable. Out of all the people who had known the other Lorca, he had not managed to trick any of them for very long, and by all accounts, Sollis and Caxus knew the other Lorca very, very well. He pointed this out.
"Do not worry," said Lalana. "It is you they wish to meet. I knew they could keep a secret and so I told them who you were."
"That wasn't your secret to tell," Lorca chided.
"Wasn't it?"
In the end, they could not go to Risa because it was too much a risk. Sollis and Caxus came to them, beaming aboard the Hayliel after very carefully confirming Lalana was standing far enough away that there was no danger of materializing where she was standing. Lorca shielded his eyes from the blinding white light of the transport. Since they were not headed down to the planet, he had seen no reason to spray his eyes that morning and now he was being rewarded with a wincing pain for his sulking laziness.
"Sollis and Caxus, it is so wonderful to have you on my ship at last. May I introduce Gabriel Lorca?"
Lorca lowered his hand and squinted at their guests, unsure what to make of them as his eyes adjusted.
He froze with his arm hovering in the air. It was her. Impossibly, unbelievably, and miraculously her, and because Risians lived much longer than humans, she looked much the same as she had back then. Those unmistakable emerald-green eyes, the cascade of wavy honey-brown hair, sun-kissed skin and a smile that made you want to drop everything and run to wherever she was.
These details had been entirely diminished in the version of her he had once known, but here they were presented in full radiance, and she was even more stunning.
"You're Sollis?" he asked.
Sollis smiled. "Like the word 'solace' in your language, meaning comfort."
Lorca had never known her name. In his universe, it was likely she had never had one. Many slaves were never given names or were taken from their parents at such young ages they never knew them. If he could have chosen a name for her, though, it would have been exactly that. Solace was what she had been, the other version of her, for that brief moment until Georgiou took her away and created a wound that lasted until he found new purpose in Michael. Now, here she was again, entirely restored. He could scarcely breathe at the sight of her.
Sollis could tell there was something more to this than a mere first meeting. She could see the pain and shock and sensed it was connected to her. There was a lopsidedly helpless yet hopeful smile on Lorca's face, a wish he could not speak, and a despair just beneath it.
She decided to do something about it. She approached, arms raised, and hugged him. "It's a pleasure to meet you," she said.
He wrapped his arms around her after a moment, returning the hug more tightly than he should have. Her hair smelled faintly of flowers and the sea. Destiny, he decided. It was destiny. "I've missed your face," he said softly in a whisper only she could hear.
She smiled and closed her eyes, because even if this was not her friend Gabriel Lorca, there was no denying she felt the same. "I missed yours."
Standing to the side, Lalana and Caxus watched this display of desperate familiarity without judgment. Caxus touched a finger to his lips in a pensive motion Lalana recognized all too well. "This Gabriel is a little more of a one partner person," she advised.
"That's disappointing," said Caxus mildly.
"Nn. He is a very good Gabriel Lorca, but he will never be our Hayliel, not entirely."
Caxus reached over and twined his fingers around Lalana's tail. "There was only one Hayliel Lorla."
Watching Lorca and Sollis with unblinking eyes, Lalana pressed her hands together thoughtfully. She was reminded for a moment of Mischkelovitz's sacrifice—a sacrifice intended to save some other version of Gabriel Lorca in what Mischkelovitz believed was the original timeline. If Mischkelovitz was right, then maybe there were two Gabriel Lorcas in the world she had gone to, and maybe one of them was Hayliel.
Except John Allan had gone back in time to the Triton and put Hayliel in Lalana's path. That probably meant in the original timeline, Lorca and Lalana had never met and shared the things they shared here. If so, there was only one Hayliel Lorla, and he was gone.
How happy she was to have ever known him. How much she wished to see him again. All she had left was his reflection from the other universe.
A/N: Concludes episode 15, "Will You Take My Hand?" Any resemblance to a certain deleted scene you might have seen on Youtube... that's not coincidental, it's that the show writers essentially reached the same conclusion I did. I just did not write fast enough to get my version posted before theirs. I realize no one has any reason to believe me on this count, but it's true!
Two more chapters and then we're done. Also, this is farewell to O'Malley and Groves, but say hello to a familiar face you probably didn't expect to hear from again.
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
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101 - The Memory of Your Heart >>
Locked away in the bowels of Discovery, Lorca could only guess at the details of Discovery's present mission. He was aware when the spore drive engaged, jumping them to a location that made the ship creak under pressure, and aware when they jumped again, but entirely ignorant as to what happened in-between.
Lalana, however, was watching and listening to the bridge, so she heard when Burnham contacted Discovery from the surface of Qo'noS to inform them that what they thought was a mapping mission to locate military vulnerabilities was in fact an attempt to detonate a hydro bomb in an active volcano chain and cause an explosion that would render the whole of the planet uninhabitable. Worse, the bomb was already too far within the planet's crust to extract.
It was, to Saru and the rest of the bridge crew, an unthinkable atrocity. "Is this how Starfleet wins the war?" Burnham demanded of Cornwell. "Genocide?"
Cornwell was gone from Discovery now, back at Starfleet's current temporary command, far from the front lines where her tendency to freeze on the bridge would not undermine the efficacy of an active starship. Lalana listened as Cornwell responded to Burnham's criticisms by defending the decision as a necessary atrocity. "We do not have the luxury of principles!"
Saru rose from the captain's chair. "We are Starfleet," he said. Around him, Detmer, Owosekun, Bryce, and the rest of the bridge crew rose in support of their acting captain. They had been to another universe where humans committed these kinds of atrocities and they were determined to prove that they were different from the Terrans in every way that counted.
"What is it you're suggesting?" asked Cornwell, registering shame as she realized her proposal to destroy Qo'noS was more of a threat to Starfleet than the Klingon incursion. The Klingons could only physically destroy the institutions of the Federation. Cornwell's plan threatened to destroy the Federation's soul.
There was no reversing the course of the bomb, but they could give control of it to someone who could use the bomb's presence as a bargaining chip against the many disparate Klingon houses.
L'Rell was surprised when they returned her clothes to her and released her from the brig—even more surprised when they handed her the detonator controlling the bomb and told her what it was. "Klingons respond to strength. Use the fate of Qo'noS to bend them to your will," instructed Burnham. "Preserve your civilization rather than watching it be destroyed."
L'Rell had once followed T'Kuvma, a visionary who believed in a united Klingon Empire, all houses working together under a single banner of strength. She still believed in that ideal. Now she possessed a tool that would enable her to see this vision made manifest. L'Rell wondered what part her scarred friend from the brig had played in orchestrating this moment. From where she stood, her freedom seemed to be the culmination of Petrellovitz's promise, and more.
She stood before the assembled houses, revealed that she held the power to destroy Qo'noS in the palm of her hand, and the war ended not with the destruction of a planet, but with something almost approaching diplomacy.
"Prepare for transport" was the only warning given. Light shimmered around Lorca and Groves and they rematerialized in a proper guest room with windows and real seating. After what had been a long and exhausting night, the beam-out genuinely felt like escaping from a hole.
Saru was waiting for them. "Apologies for not releasing you sooner, a great deal has transpired. The war is over." This was a slight oversimplification. There were still Klingon stragglers, a few houses resistant to the idea of giving up on so glorious a victory even when their planet's fate depended on it, but the larger part of the Klingon forces had withdrawn.
"How?" asked Lorca. He watched Groves turn greenish at hearing how Cornwell had ordered the annihilation of Qo'noS. It was, Lorca silently thought, a tactically sound plan, as much as it reeked of Georgiou. Still. Some part of him was relieved it had not panned out exactly as intended. Discovery's crew—his crew—had held fast at the crucial moment. He hoped that rankled Georgiou. "Where is she now?"
"She has been released, as per her agreement with Starfleet."
It seemed unthinkable. Georgiou was being allowed to go free and impersonate herself in this universe. "And my agreement?" said Lorca.
"Arrangements are being made. I am not privy to the details."
Sighing, Lorca shook his head in disbelief. Cornwell had essentially taken everything he wanted and given it to Georgiou, right down to winning the war and being the great hero everyone would remember until the end of time.
"Now what?" asked Groves.
They were at Tri-Rho Nautica, the last remaining active Federation shipyard. It had become a crucial Starfleet installation, its repair facilities the only thing keeping the remaining one-third of the fleet operational, and more resources had been committed to its defense than almost anywhere else.
Now, the engineers at the shipyard were preparing to dismantle Discovery's spore drive and revert Lab 26 to its original design specifications.
"Whoa," said Groves to that. "Hold on. Does Mac know about this?"
Saru was reluctant to answer the question, but he did. "Colonel O'Malley is presently unavailable."
"Well, one of us has to be there!" Groves exclaimed. "Can I—can I be excused?"
Cornwell had ordered Groves and Lorca confined to Groves' room, but Cornwell was gone and word had come that no charges were being sought against Groves. "You may."
"'Unavailable?'" Lorca asked pointedly when Groves was gone. In the back of his mind, he was still mulling over the decommission of the spore drive. That had been his last and best chance of getting back home.
"I..." Saru pressed his fingers together. It was difficult to admit that he wanted to consult a man who had turned out to be a fake Starfleet captain, but for almost a year, Saru's captain was what Lorca had been. "I wish to ask you something. I am aware that you are close with Colonel O'Malley. I believe I may have made an error in telling him something..."
Lorca listened quietly. It helped a bit, having someone else's problems to focus on. When Saru was done, Lorca said, "You made the right call."
"He is... devastated. I did not realize it until recently, but Emellia was his sister."
"He never told you?" said Lorca, surprised.
Saru turned away, slightly annoyed. "I take it then that he did tell you." It had been Groves, actually, at that abortion of a dinner, but Lorca only nodded. Saru remained looking away from Lorca and brought his hands together. The situation clearly disturbed him. "I had thought the colonel and I were friends. It appears I was mistaken."
Lorca's tongue clicked lightly. "I wouldn't take it personally. He didn't like people knowing."
"Cadet Tilly was aware."
That sounded entirely bizarre to Lorca, but then, everything connected to Lab 26 tended to be. "I don't know what to say, Saru."
"I wish he had trusted me," said Saru.
"Sometimes... Sometimes it's not about the person you're lying to. By not telling you, he made it so there was one place he didn't have to be her brother. My guess is he was lying to himself."
Saru realized that statement applied just as much to Lorca as it did O'Malley. It was an entirely unintentional self-description, but it put into context many of Lorca's actions during his time commanding Discovery. "I am sorry."
"Sorry?" echoed Lorca, eyebrow raising and face twisting into a demand for something less nebulous than three generalized words.
"That you did not trust me with your secret."
Lorca considered that. "I would've," he said in a way that sounded like a promise. Out of everyone on the ship, Saru impressed him the most. The Kelpien had risen to the challenge of serving as first officer with bravery, intelligence, and compassion.
Saru's fingers gracefully pressed together one after the next. "Perhaps. We will never know."
Disappointment filtered across Lorca's face at the truth of it. He might have told Saru eventually, but more likely he was still lying to his former first officer and himself. He had always been too afraid of the consequences of telling anyone. Fear was the great constant in the Terran Empire and despite all the months in the Federation, he had yet to find a way to escape the emotion. Maybe in time he would have found the strength to tell the truth, or maybe he would have pushed aside the universe of his origin and hidden in the life belonging to the other Lorca forever. Instead, here they were in this moment, and neither thing was true.
"You look like death," was Lorca's greeting.
"Thanks," said O'Malley bitterly, despondent as he stared at some imagined point on the floor.
In all honesty, they both did at this point. Lorca was haggard from not getting enough sleep and O'Malley from getting entirely too much of it in sickbay—and both had received enough bad news in the past twenty-four hours to thoroughly remove whatever vestige of hope they had remaining.
At least Lorca was being permitted to keep the guest quarters for the moment, and Saru had been amenable to stocking it with a few necessities like clean clothes and bourbon. "Drink?"
O'Malley did not answer. Lorca poured out two drinks anyway and offered O'Malley one. O'Malley reached over, took the whole bottle, and went and sat in an armchair. With a faint shrug, Lorca tipped the first cup into the second and sat down on the couch opposite.
"You have some questions, I imagine."
O'Malley didn't drink from the bottle. He hugged it to his chest, one hand firmly gripping the neck. "No one could tell me what happened. Implant... overload?"
"Sort of," said Lorca, taking a deep breath. For the second time he found himself trying to explain Mischkelovitz's actions and falling far short. O'Malley stared off into space as he listened. Lorca concluded with, "I told her not to."
"Told her?" said O'Malley, voice soft and small. "You told her not to do it. You just... told her." His head shook back and forth. A tear rolled down his cheek and plinked quietly onto the bottle. He finally looked over at Lorca with a look of pained accusation. "You should have stopped her!"
"I tried," lied Lorca, because while he had attempted to talk Mischkelovitz out of it, some part of him had not wanted to stop her and he had failed to do the one thing he knew would have worked: woken O'Malley up.
O'Malley curled around the bottle. The inanimate object was probably more affectionate than his new fake sister Petrellovitz would be in the long run.
The explanation was not the main reason Lorca had summoned O'Malley. Mischkelovitz had died and Lorca felt obliged to fulfill her request. "She asked me to tell you something. A message. 'Just as much.'"
Closing his eyes, O'Malley exhaled until he could exhale no more. Words emerged in a soft, high-pitched trickle. "I never said it, did I. It seemed... I didn't hear it growing up and the first time I did say it was to a girl I had a crush on and she ran for the hills. Fair enough, I was a scrawny, spotty thing, it was entirely unrequited, and as you've pointed out, I don't look much better nowadays. But after that, it seemed... impossible to say, and when she said it to me, I couldn't say it back. I started saying 'just as much' and it became our thing. That way I never had to say it. I just said those stupid words instead."
O'Malley drank from the bottle at last, taking a hefty swig. Lorca sipped at his own drink. There was an additional fact in there that O'Malley kept to himself. Lorca had said "just as much" when they first met. A casual three-word utterance that had amused O'Malley with its accidental relevance and set off a cascade of events that Lorca would have ascribed to fate.
"How did I go twenty years without ever telling my sister I loved her?"
"Mac," said Lorca, shaking his head and actually smiling in amusement. For all the hours of entertainment Mischkelovitz had given him on the lab security monitors, he decided to fix at least one thing for her and her brother. "You told her you loved her every day and she heard you. It's not the words you say. It's the words you mean. That's what she wanted to tell you."
The words were an effective consolation to O'Malley. He drank again, just a small taste this time, and asked, "How are you holding up?"
Lorca lifted his cup as if toasting and said proudly, "One piece, thanks." It wasn't really an answer because the last thing Lorca wanted to do right now was think about his own problems, which seemed insurmountable. He would rather enjoy the distraction of O'Malley's. "So, tell me. Anton?"
There was only one person that question could have come from. "Please tell me you're not willingly making yourself messenger of John's torture."
"Depends. I told you my story. Seems you left a few things out of yours."
"I'm going to kill John."
Lorca snorted. "No, you're not."
"But I should."
"No argument here."
O'Malley sighed and gave Lorca what he wanted, as always. "James Narvic was the face of QORYA and the impetus for its creation. Anton Nguyen was... You could call him the shadow master of the whole thing. He was handsome, charismatic, suave, deadly smart, and slippery. Could sell a man his own shoes. Little bit like you. Entirely and exactly like you. D'you know, if I saw him now, I'd still..." O'Malley sighed deeply at whatever unmentionable intent had just popped into his head. "Well, what can I say? I suppose I have a type. Tall, dark, and jackass."
Lorca imagined Groves was having a good laugh right now and grimaced. At the end of the day, even O'Malley only apparently had feelings for Lorca because he was reminded of someone else, and worse, this pretty much destroyed the tiny sliver of hope Lorca had been holding out regarding the significance of O'Malley's marital status. "I'm not gay."
"I know. Why on earth would I want something I can actually have. It's not like I'd ever leave..." O'Malley froze. He fumbled with the bottle and attached it to his mouth and left it there with the impression he had no intention of removing it. The level of bourbon in the bottle visibly dropped by a quarter. Lorca reached over and pulled the bottle away. "Oh, come on! Give it back!"
"Drink yourself to death on someone else's bottle," said Lorca.
"How many months do you suppose it took them to declare us legally dead? Two? Four? I bet Aeree didn't even wait that long."
"At least you get to go back to being alive. I don't even get that," growled Lorca, betraying for a moment the extent of his lurking fury.
O'Malley's head tilted back. The alcohol was already hitting his bloodstream and he was not paying attention to Lorca. "He was the one named them Mischka. Anton. He used to call them little mice, and in his grandmother's tongue, 'mischka' means mice. D'you know, he got out first? Cracked a deal for early release. And I was glad! I helped him get it!"
"Since when are you such a lightweight," Lorca grumbled. While a quarter of a bottle was a lot of bourbon to imbibe in one go, O'Malley had never demonstrated such an embarrassingly quick and low tolerance before. Unbeknownst to Lorca, the last time O'Malley had eaten was in another universe, and then his meal had consisted of a fortune cookie. He was operating on several days of IV fluids at this point.
"When I met you, it was like, here we go again. I knew you from the first minute... Have you ever seen something so clearly you know what's about to happen and you're powerless to avert it?"
Powerless was not something Lorca typically felt. Fear, yes, but something within him always told him he had the power to change things and shape his own destiny. Even now when people were telling him he had to be dead to history and he felt like this was the end of everything, that inner drive remained, suggesting there was some way to wriggle out of this to a fate less awful. It was the only thing keeping him going. "Nope."
"Do you know my favorite part of it all? The way you compartmentalized us, controlled who had what information at what times. It was brilliant! I know. Turns out I don't mind being compartmentalized. I'm not that claustrophobic. It's nice to have a little something to myself now and again."
Lorca decided to call Saru. Forget distraction, forget whatever Mischkelovitz thought Lorca was going to do to "fix" O'Malley, this was an abject mess he had no interest in dealing with. "Computer, contact—"
The door chimed. Lorca allowed entry, expecting this would clear the problem up entirely, because only Groves and Saru knew Lorca was in here and both of them were capable of taking O'Malley off his hands.
The woman who walked in was entirely unfamiliar to Lorca. He had never seen her before in either universe. She was medium-height, in her sixties, with a short shock of latte-white hair and a strong jaw. Her uniform indicated she was a vice admiral, but Lorca had studied the command structure of Starfleet down to the level of its captains as part of his subterfuge and had not encountered her anywhere in it.
O'Malley turned to see what Lorca was looking at and jumped unsteadily to his feet. "General Myers!"
No wonder he didn't recognize her, Lorca realized. This was O'Malley's mentor. She wasn't proper Starfleet, she existed somewhere in the unpublicized command structure of Internal Security.
Lieutenant General Janet Myers looked at her protégé and judged him to be drunk. "Really, Mac? It's fourteen hundred hours." She had a twang that came from somewhere deeper in the American countryside than Lorca's did.
O'Malley wavered. He looked very much like he was going to fall over and Lorca tensed, expecting O'Malley to get a well-deserved dressing-down.
Contrary to expectation, Myers dropped all pretense of formality and asked with genuine concern, "Are you okay?" O'Malley managed about two seconds before he shook his head and began crying. Myers embraced him and O'Malley blubbered something unintelligible into her shoulder. "You and your monsters."
They remained like that for a good minute, Lorca standing off to the side like an afterthought. Myers finally patted O'Malley on the back and released him, turning her attention towards Lorca. "Well," she said with something approaching wry amusement. "How are we going to spin doctor this?"
"How about in a way that gets me back my ship," said Lorca, crossing his arms to mirror the cross expression on his face.
Myers smiled faintly as she shook her head. "He's ballsy, just like you said. Here's how this works. Tit for tat. If you're straight with me, I'll be straight with you. I can get you a command, but it's not gonna be what you think. As far as regular Starfleet goes, you are dead, and from what Johnny tells me, you need to stay dead or history is gonna come knocking and she is a harsher mistress than I."
There was a lot of information to parse in that. Lorca immediately gleaned that Myers was the origin of O'Malley's little fair trade shtick and that she had come prepared to offer him something that might be commensurate with what Starfleet had given Georgiou, albeit with some additional strings attached.
"I'm listening," said Lorca, deciding he liked Myers. She was quick on the draw.
"Black ops. You're a little old for a commando, but you're good with tactics. There are places the Federation wants to influence that we don't exactly have jurisdiction. Complete disavowal of your actions. New cover identity. No allowances made for contacting anyone from your old life. That won't be a problem, will it?"
Lorca started to smile. "What old life?"
O'Malley was stricken. Myers caught the look, frowned at her underling, and said, "You know the rules, Mac. No more pets."
"But—"
"I already let you have the one."
This was not the answer O'Malley wanted. He started crying again, partly because he knew his wife had abandoned him for dead months ago in this universe, partly because he was upset at the fact this was more upsetting to him right now than losing Mischkelovitz, and entirely because the alcohol had completely overtaken the IV fluids. "Then I quit! I'm done! I don't want to do this anymore."
Unphased, Myers flipped open her communicator. "Myers to Quelron. Ree, stop sniffing around the cargo bay and get in here already. Your husband is losing his shit."
The crying stopped. "Aeree?" But Myers had already closed her communicator.
"You can thank me later."
Thanks were not going to be the next thing to come out of O'Malley's mouth. His shoulders gave an involuntary jerk and he dashed to the bathroom to throw up. Lorca chuckled. This was kind of great. He tilted his head towards Myers and said, "Level with me. The reason you took Mac on, guilt? Pity?"
Myers squinted as they watched O'Malley's back through the open door. "Why would you say that?"
"The man's got no useful skills and he's a drunk, emotional wreck."
The twinkle in Myers' eye was entirely knowing. "Is that what you think? He's got the only skill that matters in our line of work. He can put himself in someone else's shoes and completely see things their way. He's taken the side of every criminal he's ever sat down with. Gives us everything we need. Without that, well, you'd be up shit creek without a paddle, wouldn't you, 'captain?'"
Lorca's lip twitched.
Myers smirked. "Course, I don't think he's coming back from this one. It was only a matter of time before he snapped and threw the baby out with the bathwater." She was remarkably frank as she essentially deconstructed O'Malley in discussion with a man she barely knew. (She knew more than Lorca realized. O'Malley was not the only person who reported to her about Lorca, and the other operative had already submitted an informative initial report.) "This is something else, though. You seem to have broken him fairly thoroughly."
"Admiral Cornwell took a few whacks first," said Lorca. His own drawl was growing more pronounced in response to Myers'. "She had him trying to serve two masters. That never ends well."
"Geez. That woman is too emotional. They both are. You know what happens when you put two people that emotional in a room together?" A beat. "If you're lucky, they run out of oxygen." She laughed quietly at her own joke.
Maybe Lorca would never have told Saru the truth, but he suddenly had the impression that if he had met Myers sooner, he would have told her because she was entirely, disarmingly appealing. He suspected this was a calculated gimmick on her part. Probably everyone felt this way when they met her. O'Malley was a fumbling, meandering mess in comparison; Myers was the master he was trying to emulate and not quite managing to.
"You're not Terran, are you? 'Cause you'd fit right in where I come from," said Lorca, meaning it as a vague disparagement.
"Thank you," said Myers, who found that idea about as disparaging as a bowl of home-cooked grits.
Lorca wondered who, where, and what Myers was in the Terran Empire and why he had never met or heard of her. Perhaps she was that rare individual whose Terran counterpart was not as formidable as this version of her. Perhaps she'd simply died before his time. Lifespans were a little shorter for Terrans on average.
They watched O'Malley move from the toilet to the sink and rinse out his mouth. Myers took a turn asking a question. "I've been wondering something myself. How'd you know that Mischkelovitz'd be the one to pull off your little plan?"
"I had one in my universe," said Lorca. The way Myers phrased it, Lorca guessed she did not know his version was the one currently on the ship.
"Only one? They're much better as a pair."
Lorca frowned thoughtfully as he recalled Emellia Mischkelovitz's desperate and likely doomed desire to unite with herself in another universe. "I think they'd agree with you, general."
O'Malley emerged from the bathroom looking slightly less worse for wear as the door chimed again. The alien who entered was grey-skinned, a full head taller than Lorca, slim and graceful, with red slits for eyes. The silken white gown she wore shifted as she moved, fabric seeming almost to float on the air. There was a statuesque beauty to her.
O'Malley was elated to see his wife, but before he could manifest this elation into some form of happy embrace, Aeree sniffed at the air and her eye slits widened almost into orbs. Her head swiveled towards Lorca. "Why do you smell like my husband!" When her mouth opened, it revealed sharklike rows of frilled teeth. The sense of ethereal beauty from five seconds earlier was completely lost.
News of the transfusion did little to quell Aeree's anger. "If you ever take my husband's blood again, I will drink every drop you contain. And you, if you ever give your blood without my permission..." This admonishment continued out into the hall. Lorca and Myers did not see the conclusion of it, which would have revealed to them both it was not a true admonishment at all.
"She's a real peach," said Lorca.
"Peach pit, more like. But she's useful. Formidable species, Misellians. I'd stay on her good side if I were you."
Lorca heard the implication in there and raised an eyebrow. "Now why would I have to do that, general?"
"Senior operative assigned to you requested my best, and Aeree is as good as they come."
"Your best person is married to O'Malley? Come on, now."
"It's an incestuous little department I run," admitted Myers, though the truth was a little more nuanced than her words belied.
Lorca snorted, enjoying the pun. "As for this senior operative... It's not a command if there's oversight. I don't need someone looking over my shoulder." As far as he was concerned, Cornwell and Terral's attempts to do just that had been part of the problem the first time around.
"Don't think of it as oversight. Think of it as backup. At least till you've learned the ropes."
"You can't call a spade an onion with me."
"And you can't have a command without some conditions. I'm not trying to put a fox in a dress here. It's a pretty reasonable request for you to work with someone we trust. So what's it gonna be?"
The engineers were already at work when Groves arrived in the lab, crating up every loose item and carting out furniture. Petrellovitz was nowhere in sight. "Who's in charge?" Groves demanded.
"I am," said a gracefully athletic woman with thin lips and faded blonde hair pulled into a bun. Her uniform identified her as a commander.
"Great. Commander..." Groves extended a hand.
"Billingsley," she supplied. She did not extend a hand in return. Instead, she glared at him with barely-restrained bitter disapproval. "Are you the one responsible for this mess?"
"No, but I am the one who's gonna help you clean it up," he grinned. She rolled her eyes at that. There was something in her glare that intrigued Groves. "I'm John, but you can call me Rove. My friends do."
Her eyes narrowed. "Are we friends?"
She was extremely defensive. Delightfully so. "No, but maybe I can take you to dinner and fix that?"
Billingsley scoffed at him and directed her underlings to fill the crates so they could begin the real work in the walls. Only once the piles of engineering detritus were gone did they begin to remove panels and the full scope of the task came into focus. The modifications requiring reversion were not restricted to Mischkelovitz's secret null time spore project. There were also the many cubbyholes she had specified in her schematics, the double-door security lock, the reinforced plating to prevent anyone from transporting into the lab and accidentally displacing Lalana, and Lalana's room itself. The engineering crew worked from the back of the lab to the front, meaning Lalana's area was the first part to go.
They did not finish the work the first day, nor did they seem to appreciate the man hanging around watching and waiting on them to finish. "Is there somewhere else you'd rather be?" asked Billingsley the following morning.
"And miss seeing your smiling face?" replied Groves. Billingsley growled and looked away, but every time she glanced over at Groves, she saw him smiling at her unreservedly.
When the engineers removed the section of wall behind Mischkelovitz's desk, her hidden sleeping alcove finally revealed itself. This was what Groves had been waiting for.
The clutter inside matched the former clutter of the lab at large. The difference was that the items in the secret room had no engineering use; they were everyday objects, a random collection of things that, at a glance, had no reason for being in there.
The largest of the collected objects was an old red guitar. Groves practically shoved the engineers out of the way to retrieve it. "She did have it!" he exclaimed, retreating with his prize. "I knew it."
"What the hell is this?" asked Billingsley, peering at the blankets and assembled objects lining the compartment.
"It's a pattern." Groves felt a momentary pang of despair. Each item represented someone of importance to Mischkelovitz. There was a set of nesting dolls belonging to Milosz's mother Agnieszka, an old leather suitcase belonging to O'Malley, a threadbare stuffed bear that had once been Milosz's, and a lock of Faiza's hair. This was Mischkelovitz's way of keeping the people she loved with her when they could not fit through the door to her hiding place. There was even a bowl Saru had eaten blueberries from and a glass tumbler O'Malley would have recognized as belonging to a set in Lorca's original quarters. "Box it up and make sure none of it gets damaged."
"I'm sorry, your rank is?" said Billingsley, glaring daggers.
"Grand Vizier," declared Groves, settling down in his chair on the other side of the room and tuning the guitar.
"You should know I have no sense of humor."
"Oh? Who told you that?"
Billingsley sniffed disdainfully and looked away. "Your friend Gabriel Lorca."
"I hate that guy!" exclaimed Groves, with such earnest emphasis it was clearly the truth. "He's wrong, by the way. I can tell you're laughing right now."
Billingsley looked at Groves again, her face seemingly impassive, her lips a thin line, but then the laughter wasn't on her lips. It was in her eyes. It had always been there, even back in 2247. Lorca had missed it entirely. Groves could see it just fine.
Groves strummed the guitar experimentally and continued tuning. Billingsley ignored him initially, but then he plucked a few notes of a tune, testing the sound, and began to play.
"Pale, pubescent beasts roam through the streets and coffee shops..."
"Do you mind? We're working," scowled Billingsley after the end of the first verse.
"Just a little accompaniment to pass the time," replied Groves, playing in an extra set of bars to keep the tune going uninterrupted. She would have interrupted during the intro if she really wanted him to stop. He resumed, "Young uniform minds in uniform lines..."
The first song ended. Groves began another. "Katherine kiss me, slippy little lips will split me, split me where your eye won't hit me..."
Billingsley pretended to ignore him. She seemed as cold and unflinching as ever to most of the people around her, but Groves could see the laugh, the smile, the pretend. When the work was finished, she sent the rest of the team away and remained behind. "Dinner," she said, spitting the word sharply at him. "One condition."
"Name it."
"Let's see your teeth."
That, Groves decided, was the most delightfully strange request imaginable and he couldn't wait to find out why she'd made it. He bared his teeth for inspection. They seemed to pass muster. Billingsley sniffed in approval and almost smiled.
"So what do I call you?" asked Groves. "Commander seems a little formal."
"Sarah," she said. They set a time and place and she left just as a lightly hungover O'Malley arrived to collect the box with Mischkelovitz's belongings.
"I'm gonna marry that woman," declared Groves, staring at the door with a delighted grin.
"Then she has my sympathy," said O'Malley, wondering how Groves could even think of such a thing while he was holding a box of everything they still had left of their sister.
The answer, of course, was that sometimes when you met someone for the first time, you just knew that you were willing to give them everything you had. Maybe because they were an alien from an unknown species asking for your help, or because they possessed a unique fearlessness even while hiding under a table, or there was a laugh hidden in their eyes only you could find, or simply because they happened to say your three favorite words. Regardless of the reason, it was the closest thing to fate there was.
At last Lalana turned up. She was so late coming he had begun to wonder if she was coming at all. "Apologies for not being here sooner, I have been very busy making arrangements."
"That's fine," said Lorca. He would have minded, but between Myers' proposal and the sobering particulars of his current situation, there had been plenty to occupy his thoughts.
He was presently sitting on the couch with his feet up, Larsson's book in hand. Groves had dropped it off as some sort of peace offering. At first, the run-on sentences had been kind of annoying, but Larsson's literary voice was moderately amusing and the Uanar-Barosic Wars were an unknown conflict in Lorca's universe, so the content in the book was all new to him. Lorca tilted the cover towards Lalana so she could see he was honoring her dead friend with his choice of reading material. "I've been keeping busy. Sorry about Larsson."
"No, you are not," said Lalana. She crossed over to Lorca in three and a half strides, stepping easily across his legs and flopping onto the couch beside him. "But that is all right. I am glad you found him in the end."
"His book anyway."
"That is the best part of him." She knew that better than anyone. "Discovery will be leaving soon, so it is also time for us to go."
"Us," said Lorca in clear judgment of the unilateral decision-making her words suggested.
"Yes. Unless you wish to live in this room for the rest of your life. I do know how much you love Discovery, so perhaps Saru would let you." She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, essentially biting back laughter.
"A gilded cage is still a cage." No amount of love for the ship was going to make confinement to a single room aboard it palatable. Besides, there were things on this ship Lorca was desperate to get away from. He'd come to that conclusion after a considerable amount of thought, abandoned as he had been by everyone for most of the past day.
Lalana's tail swept through the air in a whimsical circle. "Then let us fly out together."
Lorca clucked his tongue, which from him was an admonishment, not a laugh. "It's kind of you to offer, but I got some stuff brewing of my own."
"Oh? Do tell!"
He took a deep breath. "They offered me a command. Nothing fancy, few officers and a ship. Guess someone out there realized what an asset I've been for Starfleet, past nine months notwithstanding."
"But of course they do. Had we never left this universe, you would have eventually won them the war, provided Discovery remained under your command."
"Let's not relive that again," said Lorca with a grimace. The what ifs were a rabbit hole he needed to avoid for his own sanity.
"Apologies. What do you know of your new command?"
"It's an off-the-books operation, cloak and dagger. Head off into the reaches and do things the Federation wants done without anyone connecting it to them." Honestly, that was the worst part of it. Lorca knew this universe wasn't perfect, but the wide-eyed idealism here was something he admired, and this black ops business spat in the face of it.
Lalana saw a flicker of disdain. "You are not happy about this?"
"It's not very Starfleet, is it? And there's the fact it'll mean putting aside going after Georgiou, at least for now."
"Now that she is the hero of the war, I do not think you can kill Georgiou without being revealed."
"Doesn't mean I shouldn't try."
"That is exactly what it means, Gabriel."
This topic was another angry dead-end for them both. Lorca was dangerously close to snapping at Lalana even though they both knew she was neither the crux nor the cause of the problem, it was the ridiculous threat of somehow collapsing reality. That vanished holodisc was starting to make even Lorca think there was something to it. He'd been in the room the whole time and could not figure out where the disc had gone. Vanished from time was as good an explanation as any.
Lalana shifted to a different tangent. "Have you met your crew yet?"
"One of 'em, apparently, is Mac's wife. I met her. She's... hard to forget, I'll say that." (Cornwell had met Aeree once, too, and would have described her the same way.) "There's also some 'senior operative' who's supposed to oversee me. We'll see how long that lasts."
"I would expect it to last a long time. Assuming, that is, that you accept the offer. Otherwise I suppose I shall have to find something else for us to do."
He heard the plural again and began to smile. Since returning to this universe, there had been very few moments containing any sort of genuine humor. O'Malley vomiting was the closest he had come to laughing at anything. "Arrangements." He snorted and shook his head. "You..." He started laughing. "You little minx!"
Lalana's tongue clicked rapidly and her hands spun. "I am sorry, I could not resist! That was what Hayliel and I would call an effective joke."
Her security clearance, her intelligence work, her friends in high places and enduring loyalty to his face. He should have seen it coming. "How am I gonna get rid of you?"
The laughter was written on every cell of his face. Lalana saw the stars returned to his eyes. "Why, Gabriel Lorca, would you even try to?"
His laughter finally faded into a sigh. "If I’d met you in my universe, I would've killed you."
"Then it is good we met in mine."
Then another sigh, raspy and melancholy. "I don't know if I can do this. I don't fancy being some dusty footnote in history."
"Simply because you must remain hidden does not mean you cannot make a mark on history. You simply cannot make it as yourself."
"Then who am I supposed to make it as? Captain Nemo?" He did not need her to answer because the moment the name left his lips he realized the truth of it. That was exactly what he was supposed to do. That was what Nemo had done, too, in taking the name. "All right. I'm in."
Lalana watched the spreading satisfaction on his features and quietly spun her hands. He had seen a path he could run and she was ready to run it with him. "Excellent. The ship is still a few hours out. Are you enjoying Einar's book?"
"There are a lot of run-on sentences."
"Yes, that is how Einar wrote. Will you read it to me?"
"Sure." He found his place and began. "In the second quarter of the fall season three scouts of the Seventh Durallan Legion were engaged in locating a rumored source of tritanium in the Karser Sector when they came across sixteen Barosic cruisers hiding in the debris field of the Battle of Kallam-Horical who were in the process of refurbishing derelict Uanar ships with the intent to execute..."
Hearing the words spoken aloud, Lalana recalled the truth she had learned from the first Lorca. Words really did hold the power to keep the people you loved alive. Right now, they were both of them alive, Hayliel and Larsson, thanks to the survival of another universe's Lorca.
Lalana left Discovery first, but because she had to travel by shuttlecraft, she would arrive at the new ship after everyone else did. Lorca used the opportunity to review some personnel files Myers had sent, as well as a list of potential missions they might dive into at a moment's notice. Officially, Lalana had final say for all of it, but Lorca had a feeling she would go along with whatever he wanted up to and eventually including hunting down Georgiou when the time was right.
Aeree's skillset was a little terrifying. Essentially she was a bloodhound who could shoot a phaser but would rather slice things open. "I can taste fear on the air," she informed him. "As well as lust and sickness and kindness. Do you know what I taste on you?"
"Your husband's blood?" offered Lorca dryly. She hissed through her many teeth at him.
"Impotence!"
He tilted his head and fixed her with a look. "Yep. More sex, less consequences. Don't foist your lack of children on me. I made that choice for myself. You got anything else?"
They were going to get along horribly. Even bringing O'Malley into the room to try and mediate failed to produce any promising common ground. They would have a few more days to try because O'Malley was going to hitch a ride and make up for time he had missed with his wife, but Lorca was ready to write the whole thing off after ten minutes.
The only positive was that the occasion seemed to merit some social lubricant, so at least they were standing around with drinks. Then it turned out Aeree preferred to drink her alcohol through her husband, and since O'Malley had finally eaten a few square meals, he was not drunkenly falling over himself for Lorca's amusement.
It also turned out O'Malley had decided he was done with space for the foreseeable future. "It was Melly who loved starships. She hated staying still. Maybe I'll finally get that cat."
Lorca was a little disappointed as he stared at the smear of bourbon remaining in his glass. While he had no official use for O'Malley, unofficially, he was going to miss the comic relief. He sighed and asked Aeree, "But you like starships?"
"No," she said. "They're means to an end."
In the middle of this ill-fated search for commonality, Groves wandered in with news to share and no one else to share it with. "I asked her to marry me!" he announced, pouring himself a drink.
O'Malley was horrified. "That engineering woman? You've known her for twelve hours!"
"No, I've been dating her for twelve hours, I've known her for two days."
"Groves, get out of here," said Lorca, but not only did Groves not leave, he launched into an enthusiastic ramble on the finer points of his new love, "Rah." She sounded like a real piece of work, whoever she was. "And this woman agreed to marry you?"
"No, but I'll keep asking."
"John, that's ridiculous, you can't stay here. You're coming home with me." O'Malley had by this point realized the abandon with which Groves was throwing himself at some unknown woman was probably a coping method to deal with Mischkelovitz being gone. (Lorca had realized the same and reached that conclusion within four minutes rather than the twelve hours it had taken O'Malley.)
"I'm not going with you," said Groves, returning to his usual veneer of casual boredom. "I've got work to do here."
Lorca could see the rising panic on O'Malley's face and knew it had nothing to do with present circumstances and everything to do with the way Groves had responded to family deaths in the past. "Really? Starfleet's gonna keep you on?"
Something came over Groves. He straightened, looked at them all with determination, and said, "Someone needs to hold Cornwell and the rest accountable. I know I said I wasn't ethical, but she seriously considered destroying an entire planet. More than that, it was the Klingons' homeworld. What kind of person even considers that? Someone who shouldn't be in command in Starfleet, that's for sure."
O'Malley shifted his weight, glancing at Lorca. He knew Lorca had done something of similar evil on a much smaller scale aboard the Charon when he deployed Georgiou and Stamets' weaponized spores.
If O'Malley had been smarter, he would have seen the trouble Lorca saw in Groves' future. Anything Groves did regarding the hydro bomb on Qo'noS was going to potentially undermine the tentative new peace. Groves was about to poke one of the biggest bears in the galaxy.
Lorca put a hand on O'Malley's shoulder in some sort of reassurance and said, "Sounds like you finally have a purpose, Mr. Groves."
Groves scrunched up his face in distaste. "Took a while, but I guess I got there in the end. Sort of thanks to you? There's some cosmic irony in that the person who showed me what Starfleet was wasn't even Starfleet himself. Guess it's true what Mac says. You really do give everyone exactly what they need."
Lorca's eyebrows shot up and he tilted his head, looking down at O'Malley. "Suppose you had to choose between me and Anton..."
"Oh my god, I'm going to kill you," intoned O'Malley flatly.
Lorca laughed and yanked O'Malley's shoulder, half-staggering the smaller man a step, then slid an arm around O'Malley's neck. "There's no one I'd rather have do the deed."
O'Malley's face split into a smile and he chuckled happily, flushing red. "I hate you!" he laughed, shaking his head.
And with a glint in his eye, Lorca said, "Just as much."
Weirdly, this was the moment Aeree decided she liked Lorca.
The last person Lorca spoke to on Discovery was also the first person he had welcomed into its crew. The change between now and then was immense. Gone were the deference and trepidation that had marked their first meeting a year earlier. In their place stood a truly formidable commander. Lorca smiled with subtle pride. "Well, captain, guess this is goodbye."
Saru's head tilted in respectful disagreement. "I have not been promoted. I am merely acting captain until our new commanding officer is appointed."
"Captain Saru," insisted Lorca. "I'm leaving Discovery in your hands. Far as I'm concerned, there's no one better for the job."
Saru considered that. Just like Lorca before him, he was a captain with a secret. He could have resented Lorca for it. Instead he felt sympathy. The position of holding a secret was not an easy one. "Your confidence means a great deal to me."
There was a glimmer in Lorca's eyes. Not full tears, but enough to show how much those words meant to him and how much he was going to miss this ship and its crew. "Thank you for everything, Mr. Saru."
And for the last time Lorca would ever hear it, Saru replied, "You are welcome, Captain Lorca."
A/N: Covers the remainder of episode 14, "The War Without, the War Within," and continues into episode 15, "Will You Take My Hand?"
I decided to split this chapter; I thought it was getting a little too long. That means technically there are still three left after this. Same content, nothing's being added, just slightly different numbering than I intended and hopefully a slightly easier reading experience.
Full Chapter List
Part 1 - Objects in Motion
<< 98 - A Fate Worse Than Death
100 - The Captain’s Secret >>
As they walked down the corridor, Saru considered the woman beside him. "Scan me," she had implored, suggesting there was physical proof of her claim to be Mischkelovitz. She had said other things, too—things that confused him, like "my quarters" when Mischkelovitz did not have quarters and slept in a hidden burrow in the walls of her lab.
Then there was the issue of the implant overloading, wiping Mischkelovitz's mind clean, and a miraculous recovery. Equally confusing was Groves’ panicked assertion this woman was Petrellovitz and subsequent reversal. This detail, at least, was potentially cleared up by a conversation he had once had with Groves and O'Malley about religion. I'll take a comforting lie over a truth any day.
Saru suspected Groves had done just that and the person walking next to him was Emellia Petrellovitz.
She was, for the moment, entirely docile. Saru sensed nothing that alarmed him other than the fact she was not who she claimed to be. She was making no attempt to retake Discovery and both the Mudd protocols and Brig Chess had been removed from the system, so it was unlikely she could.
He walked her to Lab 26 and wondered what to do. If she could fool scanners as to her origin and if Groves, her own brother, was going to back her claim, how to approach this without seeming entirely paranoid? He needed evidence.
The walls of the lab were open, panels stacked to the side of the door. Exposed conduits and controllers evidenced Tilly's efforts to remove Mischkelovitz's system modifications. Saru wondered if Petrellovitz would comply with the order to finish disassembling the lab to preserve her cover. "Now that your research into Klingon cloaks is no longer needed, I assume you will be leaving Discovery?"
"Why?" she intoned, voice low and hollow. "This is a science ship and I am a scientist. Provided the humans win the war, this seems like a fine place to work."
"Provided we all win the war," Saru corrected.
Her face darkened as she realized her mistake. "Yes. Because there are so many aliens here."
Nothing in Saru's words should have tipped her off as to his suspicions, but she was making it very hard for him to pretend he did not know. "Dr. Mischkelovitz, are you feeling alright? Perhaps residual damage to your brain..."
"Tell me something. If Gabriel had told you who he was from the outset and asked you for a chance, would you have given him one?"
Saru was taken aback. His first thought was that she was saying these things because she had no intention of letting him leave the room alive, but nothing in her body language, tone, or demeanor indicated any sort of danger. Slowly, Saru said, "I would like to believe that we would have."
"Then, would you give me one?"
He could not answer.
"I realize I can't maintain this pretense as well as Gabriel did, but if you help me, I won't have to. I think his mistake was not trusting you." She did not trust Saru either, she was simply beginning to understand that in this universe, you had to make people think you trusted them if you intended to work with them.
Perhaps it was a mistake on Lorca's part, but it seemed more of an intentioned plan. "I think Lorca was in a far more confusing position. A position I now find myself in as well. I assume you have prepared some form of retaliation if I deny your request?"
"No. If you deny me, I'll simply leave this ship and continue on my way. You'll never be able to prove the truth about what I am, because the truth is, I am the me from this universe." This was it, the big bluff Petrellovitz needed Saru to buy in order to secure her place in this universe. "My neural implant—her implant. When the Klingon attacked me, I activated an emergency failsafe to transfer my consciousness into her body. Because our neural structures are identical, it worked. Unfortunately, there's no evidence of what I did, so it would be your word against mine and Johnny's." (Ironically, Petrellovitz had accidentally suggested something the real Mischkelovitz's implants could do, but then, the genesis of their ideas came from the same place, even if their expertise had diverged slightly.)
"There are security monitors in this room," noted Saru. "This conversation is evidence of the truth."
Petrellovitz pointed up to the corner. "It would seem your engineer has presently disconnected them." That was the problem with trying to disassemble someone else's undocumented changes. There was no telling what would happen in the process. "I can reconnect that for you. You can keep an eye on me if you want. I don't mind. I should warn you I prefer to work naked."
This conversation was not going at all how Saru had expected it. "I do not wish to assist you with this deception."
"Then I will leave the ship. We'll pretend this conversation never happened. After all, no one can prove it did."
"A mind meld would provide proof."
Petrellovitz stiffened. "Vulcans," she said disdainfully. A side effect of placing so little value on aliens was that Petrellovitz sometimes forgot that some species had abilities and advantages humans lacked. "Are you trying to convince me to kill you?"
"Certainly not. But I am not the one who can approve your desired course of action. I will present your offer to Admiral Cornwell."
"Please don't," she said flatly, her tone entirely impolite. "The more people know, the less credulous my denial becomes. The last thing I need is anyone in command learning about it. As it is, maybe I can... beat a mind meld somehow." She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "I was hoping you'd give me a chance, as a fellow scientist. Allow me to prove my intentions. You're probably the most qualified person to run such an experiment. But if you're not interested, then let's forget I said anything and part ways. No mind melds, no need to go after one another. A truce."
Saru considered that. If Groves maintained his support of her, it was unlikely she would be convicted of any crimes based solely on a mind meld; they were easily challenged in trial. At best, she would be kicked out Starfleet and then there was no telling where she might end up. If she remained on Discovery, he could enlist the aid of people he trusted and hopefully obtain enough evidence to prove her true identity and prevent her from running amok somewhere else.
There was also a chance, slim as it was, that she was sincere. The experiment she was proposing might be a necessary one now that there were three Terrans in this universe. "If I allow you to remain here, your access will be heavily restricted. You must also remain clothed while you are on duty."
"We'll see," said Petrellovitz.
"That is not optional, lieutenant."
Petrellovitz hiccupped, surprising herself. (Having never truly laughed, her brain was not quite certain how to do it.) "Commander? I won't pretend I'll like you, but..." She smiled, and while there was something predatory in it, there was also something curiously hopeful. "Michael was right. This is a world bursting with potential. In my universe, there was no one else like me, who loved science for its own sake. All anybody cared about was what science could do. Now it turns out there are people like me. Here, in this universe."
It was, thought Petrellovitz, Lorca's best miracle yet.
Sadly, there were no further miracles to be found in the lab. When she opened the Mischkelovitzs' research notes on quantum mechanics, Petrellovitz discovered they were all audio files in a language she did not understand. It seemed she was going to have to restart her research from scratch.
There was only one other person who could potentially stand in Petrellovitz's way, but as he woke up disoriented and confused in sickbay with no knowledge of the events of the past few days, his first concern was not his sister, or Groves, or even Lorca.
"Hang on, is this stardate right?"
The one person on Discovery for whom the knowledge of their nine-month misstep meant the most was the last person to learn it had happened. His reaction was utter panic. By the time Saru arrived, the nurse was attempting to administer a sedative.
"Don't you dare sedate me! Let me call my wife!"
"Colonel," said Saru.
"Oh, thank god. What is going on, commander?"
O'Malley was forlorn to hear the full scope of the news. He asked to look at the tactical map and Saru could see the grief and worry as O'Malley brought up the Antares sector in detail and watched a replay of nine months of battle actions in the space of a minute. "Oh god, oh god," he whimpered under his breath as Klingon strikes appeared and the sector turned red.
"There are many who are seeking news of their loved ones," said Saru. "Our best course of action for now is to continue the fight."
There was one other matter. Saru considered not telling O'Malley, not yet, because the loss of one loved one was probably enough for now, but he also knew how it felt to have painful truths kept from you. "I must inform you of another issue..."
He had never seen a human break like that before, to fall so completely into abject despair. It reminded him of L'Rell's reaction to realizing the Voq she had once known was no more. Then, her Klingon scream had seemed to shake the ship to its bones. O'Malley's whimpering wail did not rise to this level of ferocity, but it also did not resolve itself into a state of ultimate coherency, and when the nurse came again with the sedative, there wasn't enough of O'Malley present to object.
Their attempt to reach Earth under Cornwell's command was unsuccessful. The Klingons had occupied Starbase 1 and as Cornwell stared at the sigil of House D'Ghor on the side of a base that had once housed eighty thousand people and was now devoid of all human life, Saru learned something both Captain Lorcas had long known: Katrina Cornwell was not suited to starship command. She sat there in the captain's chair staring as Klingons closed in around them, unable to issue any orders, until finally Saru took charge and issued the orders for her.
Discovery fled. There was no victory to be won here, only a chance to live and fight another day, and because they might only ever get one more day, they had to make it count.
Emperor Philippa Georgiou smiled darkly when they came to her. A decisive strike to take down the Klingons was what they needed, and as repugnant as Georgiou found all the humans in this universe, she still hated nonhumans even more.
Discovery made its way to the Veda system to execute the first step in a last-ditch effort to win the war once and for all: grow a crop of Prototaxites stellaviatori and restore functionality to the jump drive. They had a single sample of mushrooms to draw upon and the energy of a full set of terraforming probes to feed the crop. The ship fired the probes down onto the moon's otherwise barren surface and a forest of mycelial light sprang up below.
It was a lovely sight for Lalana to wake up to. She vibrated away the gel from her filaments and asked the computer to locate Lorca.
"Unable to comply," the computer responded. She asked for Groves and received the response again. Finally, she tried Saru, and this time she received an answer.
"Admiral Cornwell has been waiting to speak to you."
Lalana was utterly unconcerned with this information. "Certainly. Where is Gabriel?"
Saru was unable to answer this openly on the bridge, but Lalana had kindly provided him with an alternate narrative to fall back on. He answered, "His body has been incinerated."
"Well, that was rude, I would have liked to eat more of it," said Lalana cheerily and settled in to watch particles drifting in the air of her room while she waited for Cornwell. The wait was not a long one.
"You had better have a damn good explanation, or so help me—"
"Katrina, how lovely to see you. Can you tell me where Gabriel is?"
Cornwell responded with angry shock. "Gabriel is dead!"
"Not Hayliel, Gabriel. Or has the Federation instituted a death penalty for impersonating an officer in the time we have been gone from this universe?"
"You..." Cornwell took a deep breath. "Do you think this is a game?"
"Would you prefer if I adjusted my voice modulation to seem more serious? I understand you humans believe tone alters the meaning of words somehow. That has always been a very curious thing to me. How can one word mean a different thing simply because of the note that is struck by your vocal cords?" There it was, the crux of ten years of misunderstood communication. The monotonal lului tongue did not allow for tone variance in language.
It was easy to fall into Lalana's little verbal traps and engage her in one of her frivolous asides designed to distract from the actual subject at hand. Cornwell was having none of it. She said with resolute focus and angry determination, "You knew—this whole time—and you said nothing."
Speaking the words aloud, Cornwell found her breaths became labored and her eyes stung. The psychological effort required to finally confront the full truth felt like a massive physical undertaking and produced the same physiological reactions.
"What would you have had me say?"
"The truth!"
Lalana's head tilted to the side. "I never lied to you about Gabriel. I always spoke the truth."
Technically that was true. In San Francisco, she had said point-blank that Lorca was not their Gabriel. She had simply neglected to explain why that was the case and had framed the statement between sentences that, to Cornwell's human ears, made it sound like there was an implication of metaphor in the words.
It was very possible that Lalana had never used an actual metaphor in her entire nine-hundred-year life. To her, the idea that someone might liken the sound of rustling leaves to falling rain made no sense, because these were two entirely different sounds. Similarly, that someone could believe the words "he is not our Gabriel" reflected a mere change in emotional state was ridiculous. The sort of ridiculous that made her laugh, so she played with words this way every chance she got, and in doing so simultaneously told the truth and kept Lorca's secret.
"Some people would call what you did a lie of omission," said Cornwell. "But that's letting you off too easy. What you did was unforgivable. You let that man destroy everything Gabriel stood for. You helped him do it."
"Is that what you think I did? Then you have not seen him for who he is. It’s true that he is not your Gabriel, but he could become such if you would simply let him. He possesses much of what our Gabriel had."
"You can't replace someone with their doppelganger," said Cornwell, shocked by the suggestion.
"I am not suggesting you replace him, but I did love Hayliel more than any other human I have ever met. More, in fact, than any member of any species I have encountered. There is no one like him. He is irreplaceable. However, I have found that there is great happiness in the fact I can continue to see his face even though he is gone. That is the face of the human I love. I am glad it still exists in this universe."
"Do you know what I see when I look at that man? A reminder that our Gabriel died and I didn't even know." The sting in Cornwell's eyes became unbearable and she squeezed them shut.
"Perhaps I should have told you. Because of the way humans view death, I thought it would make you happier if he were still living. I also thought, and I believe correctly, that this Gabriel Lorca needed to be a captain and have a command. He needed it more than anything and so I gave it to him. Thank you for helping me do that."
Cornwell shook her head, her eyes watering. "You tricked me. I can't forgive you, either."
"You can, but you must first forgive yourself."
Cornwell started to quietly cry. She knew how important forgiveness was but she would probably never forgive herself for not realizing the truth sooner. Even if the cards had been stacked against her by both Lorca and Lalana, she felt like she should have known.
"If it is too much, I understand," said Lalana. "Perhaps in time. I do think that Gabriel would like a chance for you to know him for who he is. That bitterness and rage he holds within him, you could help him with it. Perhaps even come to see, as I have, that he is in his own way a good man. He did not come to us as such, but we have made him that, Hayliel and I. We showed him how to be this man. That is how Hayliel lives on: in spirit." Her eyes glinted as the striations of her compound irises shifted.
If lului could cry, Lalana would have cried in happiness at the idea. Many years ago, she had expressed disdain for the human concept of spirit, viewing it as a peculiarly human folly. Only when she had invoked the concept to offer comfort at a time when Hayliel stood at a crossroads had she begun to understand what it meant.
Invoking it again now, she discovered she understood and believed in it. Perhaps it was simply a ghost of a memory, but so long as she had those memories, Hayliel was with her. He had never left her. In her mind she would never leave him.
Cornwell did not share this outlook. "No. He's gone and we both need to accept that."
"I will never accept that," said Lalana. "For as long as I live. And I can live for a very long time."
"I just want out of here. I can't take this."
Lorca looked up from Larsson's book. Groves was lying in his bed, plucking at the strings of the guitar on his chest and staring at the ceiling. He had abandoned the violin. Not, he said, because he could not hack the computer with it, but because he had realized there was probably no point.
"Stop fixating on it," advised Lorca. "The more you think about it, the worse it is."
The lights went out and they heard the toilet flush. The first time this had happened, Lorca and Groves had been left wondering if something had gone wrong on the ship or if this was some kind of punishment, but in the end they realized the lights and toilet were simply set to an automatic cycle. This, for whatever reason, was the hour someone had decided should be bedtime.
Groves fumbled in the darkness as he put his guitar away. On his return trip to his bed, he tripped over one of Lorca's boots and landed half on top of Lorca. Lorca pushed him off to the floor.
"What, you don't want to cuddle?" quipped Groves as he picked himself up. "With the lights out, you can pretend I'm Michael."
"Dammit, Groves, what the hell."
"Or would you rather pretend I'm Mac? I've seen the way he looks at you."
"You have a serious problem. Didn't your mommy ever teach you not to poke at bears?"
"Sure she did," said Groves, which was probably a lie, "but I'm an agent provocateur."
"You're something all right," sighed Lorca, rolling his eyes.
Groves managed to find his own bed. "Maybe I just like poking the bear and getting bit."
"You like getting locked up? This fun to you?"
There was a long pause. "Makes me feel alive."
Lorca sighed again, this time in mild sympathy. Groves' bark was far worse than his bite. "I'll be sure to tell Mac what you said. He'll give you a good bite."
"Why would he do that?" Despite the darkness, Lorca thought he could hear the twist of confusion on Groves' face.
"That man is entirely too devoted to his wife."
"Maybe, but you're the new Anton."
It took Lorca a minute to remember where he had heard—or more accurately, read—that name. Anton Nguyen, from the QORYA trial transcript. The other male scientist on the project. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means all anyone's ever doing is reliving their own personal trauma. Whatever damage we get, we replay over and over again in our lives."
That, at least, was accurate.
Lorca wasn't the least bit tired and there was no way to read Larsson's book in the darkness, so he asked in his most pleasantly inviting voice, "We got nothing but time. How about it, who's Anton?"
The pause this time was very long. "That's not my story to tell," Groves decided.
The comms came online.
"We've all mourned the enormous loss of life due to this war," began Cornwell's shipwide announcement. As she decried their foes as lacking honor and outlined a mission to map vulnerabilities of the Klingon homeworld for a single, decisive strike against the heart of the Klingon Empire, Lorca rolled his eyes. At least the Federation was finally going to try and actually do something instead of floating around space like a fleet of Klingon punching bags.
Then Cornwell said something that shook Lorca down to the very fibers of his being. With three words, she stripped him of everything.
"Allow me to introduce you to the person who will chart your course to Qo'noS: Captain Philippa Georgiou."
"Thank you."
"Though long presumed dead, Captain Georgiou was recently rescued in a highly classified raid of a Klingon prison vessel. She was transported aboard Discovery..."
Cornwell had found the perfect revenge.
As the rest of the announcement played out, Groves heard some sounds underneath it that did not at all match with his perceptions of Lorca. Uncomfortable, he got up and made his way to the bathroom, using the manual override to close the door. This has nothing to do with me, he told himself, the same words he had thought to himself years ago as he hid in the QORYA facility walls and other children were dragged out screaming around him.
