Chapter Text
Captain’s Log, Stardate 53570.5: We are in orbit of Deep Space Nine, undergoing repairs and vole mitigation, having fallen victim to the same infestation as the station. I am not optimistic about our odds of success. The Interpreter is a large ship, currently at a third of the complement she was designed to carry; every time we root out one nest, two more pop up in areas we thought we’d cleared.
Captain Diane Chester pauses in recording her log and makes a face. She has a feeling that the voles will be with them for a long, long time. The number of hidey holes on the ship has seemed to have multiplied a hundred fold since the voles came aboard; it’s impossible to root them out of all of them. The number of times someone’s told her they got the main nest, only to find a new nest…
She rubs both hands over her face. She spent most of the war bone-tired. She thought a year after its end, she’d feel less exhausted. But it’s like she’ll never be able to sleep enough again in her life. Counselor Rala probably would tell her it has to do with trauma. Chester herself strongly feels it’s to do with the damned voles. State of the art warship, one of the best crews in Starfleet—or at least the potential to be one of the best crews in Starfleet—and a bunch of vermin are getting the best of them.
She drops her hands to the table, and looks at the blinking light that indicates a paused recording, a tall lanky woman with with long dark hair bundled loosely at the nape of her neck, an expression of thoughtful consideration in her dark eyes. She’s young for a starship captain—thirty-three next month, in fact—but then again so are most of the new crop of captains in the wake of the war. She does not feel young, though. Painfully unprepared sometimes, yes. But after the war, most certainly not young. Thanks to dermal regenerators, the Battle of Cardassia hasn’t left scars across the golden brown of her face—but there is an artificial eye in her right socket, where a Jem’Hadar soldier gouged the original out, and there are days she wakes up with the phantom of a knife in her stomach, the sliver of cold where no cold should be.
The external scars are so much easier to deal with, because she was lucky. She’s still here. Her crew—more than 600 of the 750 aboard the USS Bedivere —isn’t.
She saved only a little over 100. And no matter how often her superiors tell her it’s a triumph, that it was incredible anyone survived the crash on Cardassia at all, she cannot believe it. She would not be the commander she wants to be if she could accept it. Her life seems like it’d divided in two—before the wreck of the Bedivere , and after. She doesn’t feel like she has any right to continue; on the bad days she feels like she’s living on stolen time.
Life goes on, she reminds herself sternly. Life goes on, and her regrets will do nothing to save the dead. All she can do is make something out of it. Move forward from the war, and repair what is still there to fix.
Now she’s in command of the Interpreter, one of the many young starship captains struggling to shoulder the gap left behind by the deaths of more experienced officers.
Chester stares at her terminal a little longer, sighs deeply, and takes another gulp of her coffee before starting the recording.
Vermin are a minor consideration, she continues, as current reports from our outposts in the Gamma Quadrant—along with those of our scant allies—are rapidly trending toward the disturbing. Multiple disappearances of ships in the last week, including several not carrying supplies of value (piracy is a growing problem in former Dominion space), planets abruptly cutting off communications and diplomatic relations, and misinformation and disinformation about Federation and allied activity are a handful of the reports I have been examining during our repairs. That the Gamma Quadrant is restive after the collapse of the absolute governing power of the last thousand years is no surprise. The problem is the exact form that restiveness will take. Whatever it does, we’ll be some of the first people dealing with it. And as it has yet to form a pattern—something we can act on…
She pauses again. That’s trending toward speculation.
I dislike being surprised.
Pause, again.
Our next assignment, pending vermin control and the engines restored to proper functioning, is a general purposes patrol around Sector Gamma 2522—wave the flag, offer help when requested, and otherwise be a comforting and steadying presence. Demonstrate that a Federation starship in orbit is a good thing. It’s a tall order, but I think we could all use an opportunity to be friendly, after the last few months.
She ends it there and gets to her feet with a groan, stretching. Her personal effects, such as they are, dot the desk and standard-issue furniture. There are a few framed pictures of her parents and her grandmother, outside their Berkeley restaurant. A painting of mountains—the Sespe Wilderness in California. Calligraphy—hers side by side with her grandmother’s far more elegant hand. Still, given the size of her quarters, they look like an afterthought, a handful of things trying to make a hotel room look homey. She’s been debating pulling out the few decorations she has for Lunar New Year just to have something more on the walls.
The captain’s quarters on Interpreter are outright palatial, even by Starfleet’s indulgent standards; they were once intended to be flag officer quarters. When the war ended, and Starfleet found itself without a need for a ship to pin down the center in a large fleet action (at least not one with a foe of similar technical capability) they chopped off a third of the Admiral’s quarters, rearranged a few walls in the original Captain’s and XO’s quarters and called it a day. There’s been a sort of domino effect of added room; every single member of Chester’s senior staff are rattling around in more space than they know what to do with. Midranking and junior officers have shared the wealth; Interpreter originally would have carried flight crews and ground combat specialists, and their officers would have had quarters, too. No shared rooms here. In fact, they’ve still got a lot of unoccupied living spaces.
Which would be much more enjoyable if the ship goddamned worked half the time.
Chester pauses on her way out the door, checks the light in the alcove there and tries turning it off and on several times, without success. She sighs heavily. Another argument for the decorations. This ship can use all the luck and prosperity it can get. She keys open her door. She’ll take advantage of the downtime to go aboard the station, spend some time at Quark’s and see what old friends she can catch up with.
Besides, the USS Armistice is due in later this evening. Captain Sotek is one of her old friends from the Academy. Maybe the Armistice has the same vole problem; maybe Sotek’s figured out something she hasn’t, maybe he’s just as bewildered as she is. Either way, it’ll help make her feel better.
Chester usually meets Sotek on the upper level of the Promenade, these days, by unspoken agreement, near whichever window their ships can best be seen. Both it and Quark’s are something of a walk from the transporter platforms the Interpreter crew have been assigned, but she doesn’t mind.
It’s strange how things can start to feel like home. Deep Space Nine, during the war, was behind the lines most of the time, and the port to which the Bedivere returned most often. Even now, the tension eases out of Chester’s shoulders when she materializes. Dim light, the permanent slightly musty smell—it means being back in Federation space, back with other Starfleet ships and officers and time to relax, at least a little.
She takes the long route. The war might be over, but at times like this she wonders if she’s going to be dealing with its fallout her entire career—if everything she does will be defined by it in one way or another. It’s an unpleasant thought. She joined Starfleet to be an explorer and a diplomat. To meet new peoples, see new things, make new friends and above all else, help people. She never wanted to be a soldier, and she’s very afraid that now her every reflex and instinct are too thoroughly those of a warrior.
It’s not something she wants to be. It’s not something Starfleet should be.
A captain should be able to trust her instincts, but how can she trust something honed in battle in a time when peace is vital?
It’s a very unhappy thought. It’s one that’s nagged her constantly over the last weeks. And it’s one she needs to figure out how to deal with, because sooner or later, it’s going to be tested. And when the time comes, she cannot afford to allow it to make her hesitate.
Movement up ahead, another person in the hallway. Chester is surprised—it’s a big station, and the outer rings are usually quiet. Then she recognizes who it is coming toward her in the low station light.
It’s Tanek.
Subcommander Tanek, her Romulan liaison officer, heading her way. She immediately changes course to avoid him.
The man is an ass. The Tal Shiar has found the single most irritating person in their ranks especially for her. They have inflicted this literally gigantic—he’s something like another ten centimeters taller than her, and she already towers over most other humans—pain in the posterior on her, with his constant snide comments, his refusal to be useful, his endless ability to craft individualized feuds with each and every one of her crew. With the rather strange exception of Commander J’etris, but maybe he’s aware that the Klingon woman could break him like a twig if she was so minded. He is the single most obnoxious sentient being Chester has ever met. He tried sparring with her last week, perhaps assuming that he would naturally be more adept with a sword than she was (of course he was sure that innate Romulan superiority would give him an edge in an art she’s been practicing since she was ten) , and wiping the floor with him was the best thing that had happened to her in the last month.
He’s definitely holding a grudge about that. And she’s not in the mood for whatever bon mot he’s been crafting since then. She is not, in fact, in the mood for any of his sneering or stupidity. Not that anyone ever could be. She did not want him aboard her ship before she met him; now her feelings are a great deal stronger. But the Romulan Empire and the Federation are theoretically trying to play nice these days, and the Romulans want someone keeping an eye on Federation activity in the Gamma Quadrant. It’s either the liaison officers or tripping over cloaked warbirds every other week, and the liaison officers are the lesser of the two evils. At least, so the Admiralty seems to think; personally Chester would very much like to lock them in a room with Tanek for a few hours and see if they reevaluate that decision.
As she swerves into an intersecting corridor to avoid him, she catches the shift of shadow in the dim mouth of a doorway behind him. There is a woman there.
Chester pauses. Tanek is moving toward her where she stands in the intersection, frowning at a padd in his hands. He has not seen her; neither has the woman behind him. She’s intent on him, and Chester is tucked well around the corner. Chester watches her—Romulan, shorter than both of them, a sharp-edged beautiful face under the standard-issue Romulan haircut. Civilian clothing, oddly enough; most of the Romulans on Deep Space Nine are military in some form or another. And while Romulan and human body language are very different, there’s something wrong about how the Romulan is moving. Chester would lay money that she’s stalking Tanek, like a hunter with prey.
She’s not eager to get involved. For one thing, anyone wanting to jump Tanek in a deserted corridor has her sympathies; she’s assuming it’s because they’ve met the man. For another, she doesn’t want to get herself entangled in whatever the hell Romulan drama is going on here.
But this very common sense approach comes hard up against her duty as a starship captain, and that duty is not to let her horrible pain in the ass self-centered snarky twit of a liaison officer get himself killed, because he is one of her officers. A dead Tanek, unbelievably enough, may actually cause more problems than a living, grumbling Tanek.
So she hesitates, and waits. She will greet them as they come level with the corridor, and whatever the hell is happening here, if it’s something bad, should be quelled by the possibility of outside interference. She can talk to the man if it means possibly saving his life.
Very unhelpfully, the woman moves before Chester can casually interfere, lunging for Tanek’s broad and unprotected back. Chester catches the gleam of a blade. The decision is made for her. She launches herself at Tanek, shouting a warning as she does.
He’s very big, bigger than her, but she’s judged her leverage correctly and brings him down flat on his back in a perfect tackle. She feels the breath go out of him, partly because she’s none too careful in how she lands. Let him wheeze for a few seconds, that pride of his could use the deflating. She catches a glimpse of his face, of the rare and total shock stamped there, before she twists to meet the next attack she’s sure is coming. One hand goes down to the disruptor at his waist, the only weapon available; she’s mildly surprised to find it set to stun even now—they had a hell of a fight about default weapons settings when he first came aboard. She knew he was cooperating with her insistence to have his weapon set to non-lethal levels while working with her crew. That he’s kept it there seems uncharacteristic.
She levels the disruptor. “Put the weapon down.”
Only to find his attacker standing there, knife in hand, with an identical expression of surprise.
“ This ?” she says, scandalized. “Tanek, really ?”
“Drop the knife,” says Chester, because the knife seems like the easiest of the problems before her. “Now, please.”
The Romulan woman returns it to her belt. She’s in civilian clothes, layered and subtle shades of probably gray, a woman of average height and even more attractive up close. Her sharp pale eyes search Chester’s face, then return to the gasping Tanek, who, Chester realizes, should have shoved her off by now. She glances down at him and has the brief satisfaction of seeing him even more gobsmacked than his murderous friend.
It’s brief, because if Tanek is looking that confused, it means he’s so shocked he’s let go of his usual iron control of his expression. Tanek being honest in any way whatsoever usually presages disaster.
And is he blushing ?
“A human,” says the woman, and her voice is shading toward gleeful. “A Starfleet human ?”
Tanek’s eyes flick up to Chester, and he manages, “She does not know what she’s doing, Nivaan.”
“Looks to me like your human knows perfectly well what she’s doing,” says Nivaan, grinning. “She brought you down like she’s had practice .”
Chester frowns, suspecting Nivaan does not mean in the gym. Has she stumbled into some weird Romulan sex thing? “I think one of you owes the human an explanation.”
“She doesn’t know,” says Tanek, an edge Chester might call desperation in his voice.
“I really don’t,” says Chester. “How about you clear this up, Mr. Tanek? Perhaps you could introduce me to your friend here?”
“This is…” Tanek pauses. “My now former fiancee.”
“As of thirty seconds ago,” says Nivaan. At Chester’s perfectly blank look, she adds, “When you knocked this idiot to the ground.”
“You were breaking off your engagement,” says Chester, carefully. “By trying to kill him?”
She nods. “Though I would only have actually killed him if he was very stupid about it.”
Chester looks at Tanek for more of an explanation and finds him looking anywhere but her.
There’s a silence.
“I suspect there’s something you’re not telling me,” says Chester. “One of you had better fix that. Now, if you would.”
“She really doesn’t know?” says Nivaan, her voice thick with delight.
“Madam, if you are not going to be helpful, I will ask you to be quiet. Subcommander Tanek. Kindly explain.”
Tanek won’t look at her. Tanek is looking everywhere but her. “You have just proposed marriage to me, Captain.”
“What ? ” To her shame, Chester freezes, realizing her position. She’s straddling him, a hand on his chest and the other holding his disruptor; he’s pinned flat under her, staring up at her and perhaps also too shocked to move, and because Murphy’s Law always, always is in full force, it is at this moment that one of the doors slides open and a tousled crewman sticks his head out into the corridor and goes, “I called security.”