CHAPTER THIRTY
0712 hours -- USS Tesseract, Sickbay
Adele sat quietly on a biobed as Julian Bashir scanned her with a medical tricorder. “Thank you for seeing me on short notice, Doctor. I know you’re busy.”
“Not too busy for the captain,” Julian replied. “Now, what seems to be the problem? Because according to this, you’re in perfect health.”
Adele sighed. “Over the past several days, I’ve been more aware of my empathic senses than usual,” she said. “The difference is noticeable enough that I just wanted you to make sure there’s nothing wrong with me. I just want to get checked out.”
“What do you mean, more aware?” Julian asked curiously, lowering the tricorder to his side.
“It’s like my usual senses are enhanced,” Adele replied. “I never used to be able to read people as strongly I am now, and even when I don’t want to read people, their feelings are affecting me. For the first time in my life, I feel like it’s beyond my control, and I don’t like that. And I’ve been letting these feelings influence my command decisions, which is something I’ve spent my whole career up to this point trying not to do.”
Julian looked at Adele with a combination of interest and concern, and scanned her one more time with his tricorder. “Well, you’re absolutely fine,” he assured her. “But I can run a few tests if it will make you feel better.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment, then dropped his voice and added carefully, “You know, if you were a full Betazoid, you’d be getting ready for The Phase right about now.”
Adele was annoyed at the suggestion. “I’m not full Betazoid. And I’m not that old. My mother was over fifty when it happened to her.”
“I know you’re only a quarter Betazoid,” Julian replied, “but that means, frankly, that you’re still a bit of an experiment. There aren’t all that many second-generation human-Betazoid hybrids around, at least not grown adults. It’s hard to predict how your body will handle the balancing of human and Betazoid genetics as you age. You may experience The Phase early, or late, and you may experience it differently. But if you’re experiencing a change in your empathic abilities, it doesn’t have to be The Phase, sometimes excessive stress or lack of sleep can affect the paracortex and impact psionic range, for better or for worse.”
Adele sighed. “Well, I’ve definitely been under stress, and I’m definitely not sleeping much. But I’ve been a starship captain for six years. Stress and lack of sleep aren’t new to me. This is new -- this feeling what everyone around me is feeling all the time whether I want to or not. A couple of officers are having some issues with each other, and I met with them about work early this morning, and just being around them gave me an actual headache. That’s never happened before.”
Julian looked at her sympathetically. “Have you tried talking to Counselor Madar? Not only is she a counselor, she’s a Betazoid. She might be helpful.”
Adele shook her head. “Ms. Madar is part of the advisory board. I’d rather not burden her with my personal issues.”
Julian looked at her with barely concealed amusement. “You mean you’d rather hide your personal issues from her.”
“Precisely,” answered Adele. “Very perceptive of you, Doctor Bashir.”
“I have my moments,” replied Julian.
Adele sighed. “It’s not necessary for you to run any more tests. I trust your judgment. If you think I’m fine, I’m fine. And if you think it’s The Phase, I’ll just have to come to terms with my impending old age and stock up on trashy Betazoid romance novels.”
Julian laughed in surprise at the comment, then made a face. “Well, I hope your old age isn’t impending too quickly, because it’s the same as mine,” he said, glancing down at her chart. “We were born the same year.”
“Really? Who’s older?” Adele asked with a grin.
“I am, by two weeks,” sighed Julian.
“Nice to know I’m not the only adult around here,” Adele noted wryly.
Julian raised his eyebrows, then glanced through the transparent partition at his own relatively youthful staff and laughed. “I suppose we are the wise elders on this mission, aren’t we? God help us all,” he joked.
“Indeed,” agreed Adele. “Thanks for the reassurance that I’m all right, Doctor. I just wanted to be sure.”
Julian looked at her sympathetically. “Anytime, Captain. If you need anything else, please let me know.”
“I will,” replied Adele. She slid off the biobed and headed out of sickbay, and it suddenly occurred to Julian that the captain seemed very much alone. He hadn’t seen much of her yet, but as far as he could tell from what he had seen, she didn’t seem to have any trusted friends assigned to this mission. Every time he had seen her outside the bridge, she had been alone. That kind of isolation wasn’t good for anyone, let alone someone who was a quarter Betazoid. As Adele reached the edge of the partition separating the examination area from the rest of the floor, Julian had an idea.
“Captain?” he called out after her. Adele stopped and turned around. “You and I aren’t the only people of our advanced age aboard,” he informed her teasingly. “I’m having dinner with Adrian and Claire Keller tonight. Why don’t you join us? It’s my professional opinion that an evening of pleasant conversation would do you good.”
Adele automatically shook her head. “I’m not sure that would be an appropriate -- ”
Julian cut her off. “I insist. Doctor’s orders. I’ll even write you a prescription if you want to make it official.”
Adele assessed him carefully. To her relief, she didn’t sense even a hint of subtext to the doctor’s words. He wasn’t asking her for a date. She considered his offer. Maybe an evening out would help her feel more normal after the chaos of the past week. She hesitated another moment and sighed before answering, “That won’t be necessary, Doctor Bashir. I’ll accept the invitation. Where and when?”
Julian smiled. “I’ll pick you up at 1800 hours. Dinner is in their quarters. Claire is quite the chef, as long as she uses a replicator. And since that’s all they’re equipped with, it ought to be a halfway decent meal.”
Adele snickered. “Sounds like it. I look forward to it.”
“So do I,” replied Julian.
Adele grinned as she bid Julian goodbye, realizing that an evening of socializing might well be the best thing for her. Between the bumpy start to the mission and all the pre-launch formalities back on DS5, it had been a while since she had done anything recreational. As she walked out of sickbay, the awareness of all that she had to deal with today still weighed on her, but the promise of a pleasant evening bolstered her mood. The doctor had done his job well, she thought -- she felt better.
As soon as Adele had gone, Julian walked into his office and sat down at his desk. He sent a quick data transmission to Claire Keller advising her to expect one more guest for dinner, then pulled up the first officer’s medical file. Now that the captain was back and the young XO didn’t have the responsibility for the whole ship on his shoulders for the very first time, Julian thought it was time to address a few issues. He sent a data transmission to Icheb’s quarters, requesting that he make an appointment at his earliest possible convenience, and sighed as he eyed his file again. He suspected getting the answers he was looking for was going to be difficult. For some reason, he suddenly thought of his old friend Elim Garak, the Cardassian spy, who’d had so many things to hide. Surely, he thought, an ex-Borg drone won’t prove that talented a liar.
*****
0904 Hours -- USS Tesseract, Main Engineering
“Good morning. I’m sorry I’m late,” said Icheb as he walked into Maren’s office.
“Good morning,” Maren replied, without looking up from the desk display. She was holding a cup of coffee in both hands, leaning forward as she read something on the screen. With the assistance of his ocular implant, Icheb could see her almost imperceptibly shaking.
“Is that your first cup of coffee?” he asked warily.
“Third,” she answered, still without looking up from whatever she was reading. Icheb held his tongue, but inwardly, he wanted to groan. Too much caffeine made Maren jumpy and irritable. As if she needed assistance with that, he couldn’t resist thinking to himself. As she reached for the touch pad to scroll the text on the screen, he could see her hand trembling and sighed. All of his attempts to get her to switch to nutritional supplements for her energy needs had failed over the years. He could not understand the need humans had to hold onto damaging habits.
“Is that the code from the Tyndorans?” he asked.
“No, it’s a status report from the gel pack teams,” she answered. “Did you get a chance to look at Plan Z yet?” she asked, finally turning around to look at him. He noticed that she didn’t look any less exhausted than she had six hours before, just much more caffeinated.
Icheb shook his head. “No, I woke up late. After I reported to the captain, I came straight here. The captain asked that we work together on decrypting the Borg code.”
“Yes, I know, she got me on the comm. already. She said you’d be on your way, so I waited for you.”
“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.”
“It’s not as if I didn’t have plenty of work to keep me busy while I waited,” she replied, with a slight edge to her voice. For once, Icheb sensed her irritation had little to do with him and more to do with her overwhelming task list.
Unable to think of a comforting response that wouldn’t be taken as pushing too hard, Icheb simply nodded and sat down in the visitor’s chair next to Maren. She entered her security code into the control panel on her desk, and a drawer opened. She took out the small data storage device from the Tyndorans.
“There’s a scanner and workstation in the lab that’s disconnected from the main computer,” she said, standing up. Icheb nodded in understanding. If they were disconnected from the main computer, they wouldn’t have to worry about a virus damaging or seizing control of any critical systems. He quickly stood back up to follow her.
They walked the short trip down the corridor to the engineering lab and Maren politely ordered the ensign working on a project at their intended workstation to go find somewhere else to work. Icheb found it strange to see her giving orders. The last time he had seen her before the Tesseract mission, she had just recently made lieutenant junior grade, and mostly took the orders everyone else gave her. Many things had changed in two years, he reflected. As they sat down at the workstation and started to sift through the unfamiliar code, Icheb realized this was going to be a long day.
*****
1031 hours -- USS Tesseract, Bridge
Iden Nix uttered a Bolian curse under her breath as her fingers flew across the communications console, her closely-trimmed fingernails painted a cheery pink. The happy color was no match for her mood, which was growing angrier by the minute.
“Problems?” John Quigley asked from the tactical console two meters away. He looked like he was enjoying watching her lose her composure, and she shot him a nasty glance.
“Are you still here?” she asked sarcastically. In her estimation, the only reason the blond tactical officer was even on the bridge right now was that his best friend was the XO and Ryzal was catching up on sleep after the away mission. She actually liked John quite a bit, despite the near-nepotism that had her sharing bridge duty with him the past few days, but she was not in the mood for his friendliness at the moment.
“Still here,” he replied, as stubbornly good-natured as ever. “I speak a little Bolian, too,” he added. “The U.T. may be too polite to translate what you just said, but I know enough to know it was unbecoming a Starfleet officer.” His eyes danced with humor, and Iden whipped around to face him, annoyed.
“I apologize for my poor choice of words,” she said irritably. “Now can you please keep quiet so I can figure out why I just lost contact with the subspace comm. buoy we dropped a few light years back?”
Adele, sitting in the command chair, overheard their exchange. “Report, Ms. Nix?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “It might be a sensor glitch because of all the subspace damage between here and there. I’m working on pinpointing the problem.”
“Worst case, Ms. Nix?” Given the way this mission was going so far, Adele figured it was best to steel herself for the worst possible scenario.
“If it’s failed, it will interfere with our subspace transmissions to the Alpha Quadrant,” Iden told her, then quickly added, “but it shouldn’t have failed, those buoys have all kinds of redundancies built into them. In theory, only its physical destruction or manual deactivation should cause it to stop working, and to manually deactivate it, you’d have to have the codes. It’s even got shielding to protect it from physical damage. I’m sure this is just a sensor glitch.”
“What if it’s not? What can we do?” asked Adele.
“Send someone back to repair it or replace it,” answered Iden matter-of-factly.
Adele resisted the urge to make a sarcastic remark of her own. This situation was about par for the course for this mission so far. Is it ever going to let up? she thought to herself. “Okay, keep working on it,” she ordered Iden. “We’ll hold off on jumping to slipstream until you figure it out. If we end up needing to send someone back, I’d rather it be a quick trip than a long one.” She sighed. “And what’s one more day in the Alpha Quadrant?” she added, almost to herself.
Something in her defeated tone struck John as funny in a gallows-humor sort of way, and as he smiled to himself, Adele sensed his reaction. She turned around as if to call him out for laughing at her the way she had Adrian Keller at the beginning of the away mission, but then realized the situation probably was amusing in its sheer absurdity, if you weren’t the one in charge of the mission. Besides, she reflected, it spoke well of him as one of the younger officers with bridge clearance that he was keeping his sense of humor in the face of all the adversity they had encountered so far. He seemed a lot more level-headed than the Bajoran ops officer, Par Renn, who always looked like he was about to throw up or run away screaming whenever anything went wrong. And despite his questionable decision to jump to slipstream during the mission to Aris 4, at least he had made a decision, which he had been able to back up with reasoning, however flawed. She considered the possibility that she had misjudged him during their initial meeting after the Aris 4 mission, and wondered how his counseling sessions with Taran Madar were going.
John had glanced up at her when she turned to face him, and she smiled conspiratorially back at the lieutenant. At the look of visible relief on his face, she nearly giggled. Am I really that intimidating? she wondered as she turned away, shaking her head bemusedly. Obviously, I really do need a night off.
Suddenly, Adele’s combadge activated. “Alvarez to the captain.” She recognized the name and voice as one of the retired captains from the mission advisory board. And now, I’m going to need that night off even worse, she thought pessimistically.
“Go ahead, Captain,” she replied.
“I’d like to have a few words with you when you have a moment.”
“Now is fine,” she replied, seeing no sense in putting it off. “If you’re available, that is.”
“I’m available,” he answered.
“Meet me on the bridge; we’ll talk in my ready room,” she told him.
“Aye, Captain. Alvarez out.”
Adele resisted the urge to sigh as she stood up and turned to John. “Quigley, it’s your lucky day. You have the bridge.”
John blinked in momentary surprise, and tried hard not to show his pleasure at this development. “Aye, captain,” he replied, with forced indifference. He somehow managed to wait until Adele had made it all the way into her ready room and the door had closed behind her before walking over to sit down in her still-warm command chair. Looking around the bridge from that vantage point, he couldn’t resist a quick grin.
Iden, seeing this, had to smile, as she had reacted the same exact way to her first turn in the command chair of the Tesseract. It was a pretty impressive ship, and she knew that sitting in that chair made it feel like it was all yours, even if you only got to do it for twenty minutes, with the ship’s commander sitting in the next room, ready to take over as soon as anything actually happened. “Just don’t accidentally activate the self destruct sequence,” she teased John, then quietly returned to trying to find her missing communications buoy.
That doesn't mean he's right, just that he doesn't think that way. As for it not being fair ... they've already had that argument more than once (before this story). Icheb was on your side of that fight, which was the major reason he left. But he had to put light years between them to keep his resolve -- and he doesn't really have that option here.
They're still 24,000 light years from the DQ ...
What is going on there?
Well, as soon as I post some more. Which will hopefully be very soon. (And yes, these characters are all very tired and cranky now. At least the senior staff and their favorite helpers are, anyway. I imagine everyone else is just off doing their regular jobs and hanging out on the recreation deck in their leisure hours, along with trading rumors about what's going on with the mission.) 
) ... I will say that Q wasn't kidding about danger ahead. And I see we have another vote for Maren not being an easy target ... I'm curious what makes you think that, as well. Re: Maren and John ... I take it you wouldn't approve of such a thing. 
