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etymologyofmind · 1 year ago

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It's Not a Puma

There are many ships in the galaxy large enough that Night and Day, as concepts, do not apply; enough people, enough activity, and a colony can function full time without stop, where different patterns and flows muster themselves as others fade. Aboard ships with many hundreds, even thousands of participants, small towns of civilization form routines that keep the lights on at all hours and to retire from the bustle is a privilege for the well-to-do or the higher ranked to aspire to.

Aboard ships like the Vellouwyn, where there were scarcely a hundred crew operating an island in the dark, there wasn’t enough cause to keep the lights on always, or to segregate all the bustle from the silence. Night came to most places aboard, even when they were in use, and at times of low consumption parts of the ship dimmed and quieted, leaving more opportunity for individuals catching up on work to personalize their experience, or simply to amble about with their thoughts as they kept their hands busy.

Deep in the belly of the little ship, a powerful heart thrummed with the capacity to bend the space between stars. In the original Nova Class, the Warp Core spanned three vertical decks, coupling to a navel on the ship’s underbelly in case it should need to be jettisoned. Aboard the Vellouwyn, the warp core had been replaced with something rather more experimental, calling back to the earliest days of warp flight in the Federation by having the reactor mounted horizontally through a chamber built for research and analysis, with a catwalk about its circumference that it might span two full decks. The original three deck reactor had been replaced with one which would span four, and various experimental flow regulators, dilithium distillation chambers, and matter/antimatter injectors studded the room at different intervals, waiting for the opportunity to perform warp technology research. Though warp sciences had been studied in many laboratory conditions across Federation space, and much was learned from both enemies and allies over time, priorities had not been such that an active ship might specifically have labs oriented towards propulsion research in the field, let alone some of the more interesting components waiting to test new areas such as quantum slipspace technology, or transwarp.

At this ‘late’ hour, few needed to man these stations, so few did, and the engineering section was darkened and quieted to allow its occupants their needs while otherwise conserving power. The low thrum of the reactor, the catwalks and the outcrops all served to deepen the effect of the shadows and the silence, leaving the room’s few occupants largely oblivious to the stalking bulk of the large predator which wandered the darkness, its low growls lost in the equally low mechanical tumult as it hunted its prey…

At the forward research station, a Benzite crewman named Quorrok paced back and forth around the environmental sensor array station, looking at the readouts of a number of computer consoles. They had joined the so-called Abraxis Expedition because one of their instructors on Denorus Station’s deep space survey project had recommended that Quorrok get time away from the lab, and actually experience some of the environments they were researching. The professor had been someone who inspired Quorrok, which had been the only reason they had considered the assignment, thinking that it meant about as much to be standing in an astrometric survey lab looking at planetary readouts as it did standing in a fully equipped, specialized research station for the very purpose, but the instructor had been insistent.

“Some day, Quorrok, you will want to taste the air your instruments have sampled, and see the plant life which have birthed it, or feel the breeze of the volcanoes and oceans which stir it to life. You will want to find worlds where your breather can be put down, and walk through meadows there. Simulations and numbers are beautiful, but in many ways sterile, and if you live your life too long here you will not know the wonders of why you do this work.” She’d said, her bright Risian countenance filling with a shared expression of sensuous wonder as she spoke. It was infectious, and so here Quorrok was, prodding the forward survey database and long-distance sensors for information on worlds that might be interesting to see, far enough away that their instructor may never glimpse them through their deep space telescopic lenses.

Quorrok reached down to their side, patting at the small tool pouch that hung hooked to the belts at the waist of their new uniform, and plucked out a micro caliper. It was curious to them to have been issued a uniform with so many embellishments, and they did not feel as if so much accoutrement was necessary for their role as an Environmental Specialist. The captain, however, had insisted, and even gone so far as to acquire special dispensation from Star Fleet Command to permit the unconventional requirements of their duty personnel to always be wearing the security sash which slung across Quorrok’s upper body, and the weapon which was stowed away in a visible sheath at the small of the Benzite’s back. If anything had felt incongruent with the Star Fleet ideals which had been drummed into their head, along with every other member of the Federation crew, this had stood out as most jarring.

Taking a few precision measurements on the holographic projection of a cloudy world which had been expanded on one of the pedestals next to the workstation, Quorrok chuffed an unsatisfied, frustrated sound, realizing that the micro caliper they held was misaligned, and that they’d need to report to the mid-deck provisioning station to check it back in and request another. They rapped it against the console in frustration a few times, their overlapping Benzite lips and tendrilous ganglia writhing in their species’ equivalent of a sneer, before setting off along the port corridor. Overhead, spotlights warmed slowly in front, dimmed slowly behind, adjusting the lighting to comfortable levels in a perimeter around the crewman while they walked. This was, effectively, unnecessary: everyone knew none of the lighting on the ship drew enough power to require such brightening and dimming, running as it could from static energy produced as a by-product of running half of the shipboard equipment, and running the sensors probably contributed a larger power drain than it saved offlining unutilized stations, but the sense of presence within the ship that came with its reactive awareness of ones movement had been proven in some long ago study, so the ship made islands of light around its night shift crew like lanterns through the shadows.

Ahead, still ensconced in shadows, a monster lurked and waited to pounce…

Meanwhile, at the aft section of engineering, Junior Lieutenant Denna Morris had spent the better part of her off-cycle shift trying to root out the cause of a nagging power fluctuation which had been buzzing through the engineering decks like a clingy piece of fabric. Usually, the issue wouldn’t have been remarkable, but the Vellouwyn had been equipped with a state of the art network of holographic emitters which covered a number of crucial areas across all decks of the ship. Not all areas were covered, with everything from turbolifts to Jeffries tubes having been considered too low priority to bother, but the mess halls the bridge, medical of course, and engineering all had merited the upgraded systems. More than the simple pedestals which projected images in low resolutions and without the standard tactile experience, Engineering’s emitters could be tuned to help produce hard-light photonic prototypes, engage tactile simulations, or to project interactive characters on loan from some of the approved databanks into the compartment. Whenever something went wrong with one of these emitters, such as the irritating drop in power they were experiencing intermittently, it was logged in the holomatrix core analytics center, where Dan Ironside and his team would inevitably cut a service ticket to figure out what was wrong with their systems.

This meant that Denna got to spend a few hours of her time trying to climb her way up to the emitter control boxes, seeing as half of them were mounted at the tops of the bulkheads, and work out what was going on with the devices. What she’d been finding all shift was that each of the emitters had been outfitted with a relatively innocuous modification which would not, under most circumstances, affect their performance, unless something caused them to come out of alignment, at which point it would de-resolve any photonic projections for which they were responsible. In short, the little lens cap filaments sat in just such a way that nothing would happen to the emitter unless they were pulled out of alignment, whereupon any holograms nearby would start to corrupt and disappear.

Puzzling as it was, and irritating, since it was an illegal modification, the lens filters would not explain why the holographic systems would, at infrequent times, suddenly spike in power consumption before going briefly offline. The secondary lenses weren’t tied into the power systems, nor were they made of any physical components which should interact with them, so it was just weird. Nonetheless, since Denna kept finding them, she was collecting them for analysis, and preparing a report to define the seemingly innocuous sabotage of the holographic equipment.

The damnedest thing was, all throughout her shift she had been periodically feeling the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, as if something was watching her. Moreover, she kept catching glimpses of something moving in her peripheral vision, but every time she went to check on it, nothing was there. She was feeling a little shaken up about it, but it was all just something she was attributing to working in the eerily quiet engineering compartment during a dark shift: “Shadows here leap, and one is a fool to jump back at them”, as the chief engineer had told her on her orientation tour of the ship. Nevertheless, as she wiped her brow on the sleeve of her duty jacket, working on getting the isolinear chips in the little control panel back into place as she checked them for surge damage, all while balanced on a folding stool and working with her arms over her head, she cursed the feeling of being watched and wished she had any idea what was going on.

On the deck below her, lurking beneath the catwalk underfoot, slitted yellow eyes glowed with outrage as an island of light casually made its way closer and closer to where it sat hunched and ready to take its leap…

Quorrok sighed, looking at the padd in their hand. They had to hold it up at an angle so they could work with it clearly, and though they’d grown accustomed to it since leaving home, it was never pleasant or convenient to them to have to look past the breather arch poised near their chin. The arch emitted a constant low-density cloud of carbon trichloride gas, with water vapour and mineral salts added to the mix, in order to locally change the standard atmosphere to one closer to the Geostructure for which they had been tailored at birth. Quorrok could work through duty shifts without the arch, but it was much less comfortable, and left prolonged irritation to their lungs and lips which could make for larger consequences over time. Some Benzites from other Geostructures could manage better, some worse, but the arch was standard for most of Quorrok’s kind in Starfleet since ‘standard breathers’ weren’t actually among the common environments built into their home systems.

As they huffed their way down the hall, passing the padd back and forth from one thumb to the other on their left palm while skimming through readouts of the world they were studying, Quorrok became aware of a faint whine on a band most humanoids didn’t parse as audible. They pretended to ignore the sound, but couldn’t help but twitch their ganglia in amusement, knowing what was sure to come next.

A deck above, the tricorder on Denna’s belt began to trill quietly, buzzing a faint insistence on her hip. Reaching past the sash, she plucked the device from its holster and splayed it open with a twitch of her wrist, abusing the hinge on the apparatus in a way that would certainly have the quartermaster crawling down her neck over microfractures at some point. Its readout displayed that the emitters adjacent to the one she was working on had begun to build up a charge like those the logs showed during the outages she was tracking, and she silently blessed her luck for the chance to see first hand what was going on. Stepping backward off the stool and pulling the sensor probe from the back of the tricorder, she started taking more focused systems readings about what was going on, padding her way over to the piscine ladder which would let her drop down from the catwalk to the deck.

The sound she heard next sent every hair on her body to attention, not just those on her neck, as primal instincts warred with cognitive dissonance to disbelieve the strangeness of the beastial roar she head surge up through the honeycomb catwalk under her boots.

The beast could feel its back prickling as the holographic sensors began to pull out of alignment nearby. It was an uncomfortable, enraging sensation, feeling the essence of ones self being tugged at like a thousand tiny threads, like ants marching through ones skin. It dropped its jaw in a low, hungry way, and as its prey neared in the halo of luminescence carried around it like a lantern, the beast surged forward with a wrathful howl…

Quorrok did not even break stride. This was not the first time this thing had lashed out at them, and it likely would not be the last. In the first few weeks aboard the Vellouwyn, the Environmental Specialist had gotten to know some of the crew, gotten to know some of the duties, and gotten to know some of the good and pad parts of being on this assignment. One of the things they would consider ‘bad’ was the entity known as ‘Doc’. Doc was one of the recently ‘liberated’ artificial intelligences flaunting their presence throughout Federation rumor mills, a holomatrix which had outgrown the limits of its programming because of the lazy, self-entitled stewardship of a human researcher named Lewis Zimmerman.

The liberated matrices, formerly known as “EMH, Emergency Medical Holograms”, had once been decommissioned and delegated to labor duties not suited to organic workers, either due to hazards or life support requirements in an environment, mostly because they all expressed, at one time or another, an inverted memory leak which saw their program bolting fragments of code complexity to their base frames in ways which led to unpredictable outcomes. Some of the EMH series in first, second, and third class had shown an alarming propensity for violence, the capacity to fundamentally decouple from moral guidelines designed to protect their creators and other organic life, or simply rampant madness as the elements they tethered in to their code took over increasingly more important subroutine priorities, turning them into gibbering chaos.

Still, some survived, and once Starfleet had seen fit to liberate their lines based on the appeals of the Voyager EMH, who most of these deluded programs called The Chief Physician or something like it, they had gone on to completely overstep their bounds and stake claims to authority Quorrok did not believe they should possess. These were tools, toys even, given agency and authority to read through mystery novels and training manuals to build quiltwork identities, taking textbook specializations and calling it experience as if they’d earned the knowledge rather than simply incorporated it. Quorrok didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, and certainly didn’t respect them, so when they’d started crossing paths in engineering since Doc was, ostensibly, the Chief Technology Officer on the Vellouwyn, and by rank the Senior Chief Petty Officer, Quorrok had taken an instant disliking of their audacity and attitude, and the presumption that this deluded holonovel character outranked them.

So, Quorrok had commissioned Viijna, an Oran'taku they had met and befriended during their shared layover stay at Deep Space Nine, to help them build a prototype which could disrupt a holo emitter projector when exposed to an appropriate energy band. The solution she’d given Quorrok had been ingenious, involving a lens which would be completely unobtrusive during normal operation, but once exposed to the a particular, harmless band of EM radiation, would distend a bi-charge filament within the lens that bowed the structure in a particular direction slightly. This was not enough to damage a holo emitter, but there had been enough horror stories on Federation ships of holodecks going rogue without producing adequate physical safety solutions that it hadn’t been hard for them to talk Viijna into the work. It also worked without needing to integrate into the unit, which was a major plus in Quorrok’s opinion.

Doc didn’t know how they were doing it, but any time the toy got near Quorrok, the portable EM emitter would interact with the lenses they’d taken the time to surreptitiously install across the Engineering deck, and Doc would get de-res’d. So it was that when the massive Sarkalian Tiger launched itself out into the middle of the corridor, skidding on the gravity plating until they dug silvery talons into the grooves of the floor, springing forward with an unholy howl, the Benzite didn’t even flinch. An unexpected result of the experiment had been learning that when Doc was planning one of these ambushes, the gathering energy in the EM-impacted holo emitters would cause a high-frequency whine that tipped Quorrok off to the presence of a nearby holographic projection and its associated trap.

His prey was there, face buried in a padd, ignorant to what was coming. Doc wouldn’t hurt them, not really: the figure of the tiger was large and imposing, but had been tuned to bring its mass down to an equivalent of a humanoid of the Benzite’s size, big and hollow. He wanted to scare them, though, wanted to knock them off their feet and make them feel the hot, angry breath of a superior officer looming over them, since the runt didn’t have the decency, even, to acknowledge rank. Doc couldn’t bring this up with one of the other Petty Officers, or forbid, one of the enlisted officers, without losing face and dignity, and that galled him. He had to do something about his own problems on his own, or he would never be respected by anyone else.

However, when his projection crossed over the threshold of shadow into the lights emitted around the crewman, who had deigned to look up with pleasant, bemused entertainment, the photons that made up their body began to warp and distend. The subroutine which was responsible for keeping track of Doc’s physical bounds, to help keep himself and others safe and calculate where things were in the world, overloaded as it tried to calculate for the missing references, and suddenly a foreleg disappeared up to the shoulder. Power surged through the emitter circuits as they tried to keep up with and cope for the sudden de-resolution, and as the field of electromagnetic radiation being produced by the crewman’s tricorder reached the next emitter, the lens began to distend, and Doc had to scramble back away from the light to keep corporeal.

It was a maddening, excruciating, humiliating experience. Missing a whole foreleg, forced by the integrity of their program to compensate for this phantom limb loss, he scrambled backward with a pained howl of panic as he felt his body begin warping again, slowly getting worse. He stopped only when he was out of range of the effect, the holographic program of the tiger panting in agony as it lent realism to his borrowed image.

Quorrok had the absolute worst expression of cool disdain on their face as they stepped slowly forward, speaking as if they hadn’t even seen the creature lunge and retreat. “My, but the ship sure is creaky down here in the dark. I can see why Chief Engineer Vantel said it might be off-putting. Ah well I am sure it’s just a trick of the light.” The said, narrating for Doc’s benefit.

Before they could take another step forward however, there was a rushing sound from the nearby piscine ladder. Denna had watched the altercation with dawning horror from above, and as the Benzite began to step forward towards the prone and cornered hologram, she grabbed hold of it’s the ladder’s side rails, planted her boots outside the rungs, and slid the 20 feet down to the lower deck to land with a clang. This startled Quorrok, who twitched and nearly dropped their padd, catching it with their second thumb at the last moment.

Denna was human, tall, wispy thin, with sharp green eyes and simple mousy brown hair which she wore trimmed to finger length, with the exception of a pair of braids which ran down into her collar and who-knew how deep down the back of her uniform. The style was an affectation of earth’s Luna colony for some of the families who’d lived there a number of generations, a way of showing their pedigree as ‘moon units’. The sash she wore across her chest had a number of bands that showed she was much higher rated than Quorrok was as a ‘security’ officer, and her collar bore the pips of a Junior Lieutenant, outranking both others on the deck.

As she stood, the Benzite caught a glimpse of a prosthetic under her uniform: a back brace, which he knew from rumors around the crew was because Denna and her family had lived and served most of their lives in a part of the Luna colony that had natural gravity, willing participants in a research program the earth government had been running for naturalized citizens on their local systems. It had been going since at least their First Contact days, so Luna’s bloodline was prone to the challenges of full gravity environments, and the back brace would have coupled with leg braces under her boots and fatigues which would help support her comfortably in a standard G. Landing on the deck as she had would have been at best uncomfortable.

She turned her attention immediately to the crewman, putting her back fearlessly to the maimed tiger in the corner. “You.” She said, acidly. “You have been the one making me go through all this bullshit all day. You’re the one who put these,” she said, pulling the sand-dollar sized film she’d just collected from the upper emitter out of her pouch and throwing it on the floor between them, “into all of our emitters. Do you know you can be court martialled for this sabotage? Were you aware that I might come down here and beat your ass seven ways from Sunday for messing with my systems?” her fury was plain, and in that oh-so human way, casually intense. Quorrok began to falter trying to think of a response, but she shut them up by stepping forward at a march.

“No I don’t expect you were thinking of much, were you Blue? Just wanted to show off how fucking smart you were, and push someone around while you’re at it, is that it?” she stopped, gesturing behind her to the low, smouldering glower of Doc, who had reverted to their human projection but nor moved from where they’d retreated to; the holo emitters in the shadows were functioning properly over there, so cutting back to base program had restored Doc’s right arm to its base state, and the emitters no longer hummed to Quorrok’s ears to maintain the projection. “You just wanted to push someone around with your bullshit antics and make them fear you, is that right? Show them howe you had power over them, hey?”

The Benzite had the courtesy to look aghast at the accusation, stammering a reply: “N…no sir! It isn’t suffering, sir, it just can’t bother me while I work! It’s not like I’m hurting anyone, sir!” they chattered out while clutching the padd to their chest defensively. This was not how they had expected things to go.

Denna pinched the bridge of her nose, putting her face into her palm, before returning her gaze to the Benzite. “Not hurting anyone. Do you know how stupid that sounds, crewman?” When Quorrok tilted their head in confusion, Denna went on. “Look at him. You injured him, and he pulled back. I suspect this is an escalation, since someone doesn’t just start out their interactions with a crew member by jumping them in a hallway, but you, with these bastard trinkets, injured them. Do you understand me? You have assaulted a fellow crew member, and a superior at that, and I am stunned that you,” she said, glaring at Doc where he sat with arms draped on knees, “thought this was a good idea of how to go about dealing with things.”

From behind her, Quorrok made another mistake. “But sir, it’s just a program. It can’t feel pain. I can’t insult or injure it; it doesn’t have those feelings. It’s photons and code, and it has stitched simulated self importance in. That does not entitle it to command me.” They said, stiffening their back, ready to defend their stance.

Denna turned around slowly. Carefully opening her tricorder, she pulled the probe out and ran a quick survey of the immediate area, and, satisfied with what she found, stepped over to the Benzite. She smiled disarmingly, reached out to tug their ruffled uniform into place for them, and carefully picked the tricorder that hummed away producing the low band EM field out of its holster, powering it down with a switch on the side. Immediately the barely tangible sense of tension left the air around them, and there was a faint crackle as the lens she’d thrown on the deck returned quickly to its inert state. Quorrok trembled, but did not move.

“Senior Chief Petty Officer Doc, come here please, I’d like to have a discussion with you and your crewman.” She said; it was phrased as a request, but it was clearly a command, and Doc pushed himself to his feet, stepping closer to the lighted area of the deck. As he approached the illuminated segment, he paused, anxious not to feel the sensation of being de-resolved again, and gingerly reached fingers out into the light. When they didn’t twist or bend, he slid a foot onto the deck, and then followed it with another, approaching the pair warily, still silent, but face speaking a thousand curses.

When the three were standing close enough to touch, Denna began to walk around the pair. It was strange to be this close to her, because she topped six feet comfortably, and neither of the other two were above five and a half. “Firstly, crewman, she said, putting the emphasis on the Benzite’s rank again, then gestured at the chevrons and stars on Doc’s collar as she walked past his shoulder. “This is a rank insignia. I expect yours is new to you, since you don’t seem to understand that the more bendy bits and sticky outy parts one has, the higher their rank seems to be, until you get to enlisted officers like myself where the roundy parts and filled in dots tell a different story.” She pushed her thumb out against the pips on one of her collars to make the point. “This entitles the Senior Chief Petty Officer to command you.”

Doc’s dour look didn’t change, as he wasn’t impressed by the demonstration, being not the first time it had been given for his benefit. Quorrok blushed in the Benzite way, blue skin darkening to a purple-ashen grey as they snarled silent dissent. Denna noticed it immediately, and stepped closer to the crewman. “And secondly,” she continued, glaring right into the Benzite’s face, breathing vapours which would be harsh and sour to the human palate, “This is not an it. If I recall correctly, Doc, you prefer He.”

Doc nodded crossing his arms, hoping this would be through soon. This was largely why he didn’t want to escalate issues with lower enlisted personnel, preferring to sort things out with them in his own way. They might hate him for his attitude and his rank, but they’d never be able to say he hadn’t earned that hate himself. “Yes, sir.” He admitted, sullenly.

“Then,” Denna continued, wheeling about and spreading her arms wide, “there’s what’s to do about all this.” She pointed a finger at Doc accusingly. “On the one side, we have someone who should really fucking know better stalking around the dark decks like a god damned gimmick, playing tiger tiger with someone they really should just reprimand officially and be done with, vindicating the ridiculousness others must feel for such antics,” she began, making Doc shift uncomfortably and look embarrassed, before she turned her attention back to Quorrok: “And on the other, we have a crewman who doesn’t respect the rank structure, and deigns to put themselves above another person on this ship on the grounds of their sentience,” she spat the word out with frustrated disgust, causing both enlisted personnel to shift uncomfortably for different reasons, “recklessly sabotaging their own ship for petty gains.”

She let the silence linger for a long moment as the two enlisted personnel steeped in her outrage, before she went on. “What’s really low, what galls me though, is that you did it the way you did, Benzite.” The emphasis again gave portance to the way she said the word, calling Quorrok’s species out as if it were distasteful. The change in tone was markedly uncomfortable, and both Quorrok and Doc stood up straighter when she did it. “You of all people should know what the world is like when it’s hostile to live in. You of all people should have sympathy for someone who needs a little bit of help to get by in it. But maybe you’re just so full of yourself that you forgot that little detail, hey?” Denna reached out slowly, methodically, keeping eyes locked with Quorrok as she hooked her first and second fingers under the arch of the Benzite’s breather, pulling it from the mount on her collar and bouncing it in the palm of her hand. The device hissed as it came unclasped from the reservoir of compressed gas that provided for its vapour, and the Environmental Specialist’s jaw dropped in shock. “Maybe you should try going without for a while. Maybe you should remind yourself what the air tastes like when it abhors your presence. Maybe it’ll teach you a little empathy.”

And she tossed the breather over her shoulder.

Quorrok cried out in surprise as the delicate equipment sailed through the air, only to be caught, unexpectedly, by a lightning quick grab by Doc. The hologram’s brows knit in uncharacteristic anger, and he stepped forward a pace, putting his hand an inch from the human Lieutenant Commander’s chest. There was a momentary his of air and a small flash of light, and suddenly Denna felt herself being thrown back down the length of the corridor. It wasn’t far, maybe a half dozen paces, but the intent was there, and the result the same: Doc had shoved her, and hard. She didn’t lose her footing though, and skidded to a halt on the deck nearby, looking surprised but unfazed.

Doc stepped past the Benzite to put himself between the crewman and their superior officer, taking a brief moment to put the breather back into Quorrok’s clumsy, unresisting grip before returning his attention to Denna. He had assumed a combative stance that lent itself to defense, as fine a posture as programming could detail. “That is enough, Lieutenant Commander! It is one thing to reprimand a lower member of the crew, but it is another entirely to assault someone. I appreciate you may think you’re speaking up for my best interests, but you are entirely out of line.” He looked angry and indignant, but didn’t move further towards her. “I am sorry you got pulled into this, and I will submit to your official reprimand on my file, but crewman Quorrok is my responsibility, and I will work this out. I request that you please leave this matter up to me.” His face broke, though his stance did not. “I appreciate your intent, LC, but taking a Benzite’s arch is an abhorrent thing to do. I would be grateful if you apologized.”

Quorrok and Denna both looked at Doc, who stood looking as if he were ready to fight the Lieutenant Commander if she came near the Benzite again; Denna’s look was unreadable, but the blue hued crewman was agog with surprise at the hologram’s behaviour. Not minutes before he’d been a wounded beast cowering in a corner as they approached him, slowly encroaching on his projectors, and now he stood between them and a superior officer who had given one of the gravest insults in Benzite culture, conflating it with the actions Quorrok themselves were taking. The crewman looked, and felt, ashamed of their actions, and confused at how the day had taken this sudden turn.

After a moment, Denna stood up slowly, straightening her back with a roll of her shoulder. It ached to wear the prosthetics, but she had spent the past few years acclimating to artificial gravity to attend the academy and pursue her rank, so it was something she was now used to. Her face cracked into a crooked grin, and she clapped her hands together in a display of satisfaction. Both of the enlisted looked at her blankly. “Very good. Very good. You see, crewman? Not it, but he, and so chivalrous as well.” She turned to the Benzite, bowing low at the waist as she’d been taught by her hand-to-hand instructors in her youth. “I apologize for my disrespect, crewman. I meant it, but I apologize all the same.”

Quorrok said nothing, but pinched her thumbs together on her free hand in the Benzite gesture of acceptance almost unconsciously, still looking at Doc’s back. He hadn’t relaxed. Next, Denna turned and bowed to it; No, to him. “And to you, Doc, I apologize for getting between you and your crewman on what was clearly a personal, or at least a personnel issue. I was out of place in getting between you and your business.”

At the end of her apology, Doc finally relaxed, pulling his legs up to a straight-backed stance, and bowing equal to the Luna colony officer’s. “Thank you, LC. I will accept your punishment as you see fit.”

It was informal, but respectful; LC wasn’t usually an acceptable abbreviation among officers, but it tended to fly between them and the enlisted in certain circumstances. Denna found she liked it, and few enough people deigned to use it. She expected that Doc and Quorrok would have enough to talk about without more of her interference, so she adjusted her posture to relax. “Nah. I think we’ve all had enough for one day, don’t you SCPO?” she refreshed her crooked grin, rubbing her hand across her chest delicately. “Besides I don’t know how a write up for assaulting a superior officer would help anyone today. Although, with our captain, you never actually know.”

Doc had the courtesy to look embarrassed, and Quorrok stepped closer, nervously. “I, ah, want to know more about how you did that actually. I didn’t know that was something you could do.” Doc turned around and regarded them with a scrutinizing glance, waiting. “Ah. Sir. If it pleases you.”

He nodded curtly. “I am sure I can find some time to explain the fundamentals to you crewman. At some point.” He allowed, crossing his arms. “Pending I can get anywhere near you to do so.”

Denna appeared between them with an exaggerated smile, putting a hand on each of their shoulders and steering toward the forward station Quorrok had been coming from. “Excellent idea! Great plan. But before that,” she squeezed Doc’s shoulder more firmly, “put something in your drawdown code so that whenever you do whatever it is you keep doing to spike power use in the emitters registers as intentional on Ironside’s dashboard, hey? I don’t wanna get called out for stupid jobs because you don’t sign your work.”

Doc nodded, and she turned her attention to Quorrok, who was clipping the arch back onto her breathing reservoir by its magnetic clips. “And you had better pull each and every one of these cheeky little buggers off the emitters, because if I find a single other one anywhere on this ship, I’ll see you drummed out so hard they’ll think it was a warband chasing you, am I understood crewman?”

Quorrok snapped to attention, eyes wide, and saluted. “SIR! Yes sir! I’ll start right away!”

“GREAT! Now shove off, I have work to do.” She barked, pushing the pair down the hallway. When they had taken their lantern far enough up the corridor to leave a gap between them, she put her hand back to her chest, rubbing it gingerly. At least she didn’t have to keep tracking down the bug, but now she stepped sorely into the space between the struts supporting the warp core to get across to the starboard corridor, and limped out into the hallway. It would be an annoying walk to sick bay on fractured heels, but again nothing she hadn’t done before. She hoped to see more of those two, and expected that they might live up to her expectations now that petty rivalry had been settled.

As the door hushed shut behind her, the engineering cabin faded another section into deep, sleepy darkness, lulled by the steady thrum of its heart, which beat slowly to bend the space between stars.

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