Chapter Text
The Tellarite café was, predictably, full of Tellarites. Normally, this would have bothered Icheb – their loud, boorish tendencies offended both his finely enhanced ears and his sensibilities, which ran toward the reserved and polite. But today, it was the perfect spot. There was no way anyone would overhear him talking to John. After meeting his friend at the entrance, Icheb asked for a table toward the back of the café, well out of view of the glass front doors.
“So what’s up?” John asked, when they were seated.
“Chat on your own time,” the Tellarite waitress interrupted with a grunt. “First tell me what you want to eat.”
“Why don’t you give us a minute to read the fucking menu?” John shot back.
The Tellarite rolled her eyes and threw up her hands in exasperation. “Terrans,” she said, shaking her head as she walked away.
“Bad move,” Icheb said. “Now she won’t return for an hour.”
“Nah,” John grinned. “I think she likes me.”
“Most females do,” Icheb conceded with a wry half-smile. His friend had a seemingly endless supply of women, in marked contrast to Icheb’s enduring and exclusive relationship with Maren.
“So, what’s up?” John asked again, glancing over the menu with a grimace. “Obviously you didn’t ask me here for the ambiance. It’s not like you to be this spontaneous, either. What’s going on?”
Icheb glanced at his friend in mild surprise, but then realized that John had always been fairly perceptive, and they knew each other well. He should have expected that John would realize there was more to this visit than enjoying offensive Tellarite food and culture. He leaned forward and dropped his voice until it was just barely loud enough to be heard in the noisy restaurant.
“I did something I shouldn’t have,” he said, and John’s eyes grew wide. Icheb rushed to explain before John got the wrong idea. “I didn’t really go to Andor,” he said. John’s eyes grew even wider. Icheb immediately realized that might not have been the best sentence to follow up with.
“Icheb, if you’re going to tell me you cheated on Maren – ” John began, sounding genuinely angry.
Icheb cut him off. “No! Of course I didn’t. Don’t be ridiculous. But I did lie to her about Andor. I had no choice. I’ve been here the whole time, assisting with the creation of her survival scenario. Starfleet ordered me to lock her out of the maintenance controls on her escape pod so she couldn’t reprogram anything to make it easier on herself.”
John raised his eyebrows. “That’s fucked up,” he said.
Icheb might not have said it exactly that way, but he had to agree. He nodded.
“So where is she?” John asked.
“Lincoln Sea. 83 north, 58 west.”
John’s mouth dropped open. “They sent her to the fucking North Pole?” he asked, incredulous. Then he chuckled. “Jesus, that’s brutal,” he said, shaking his head.
“That’s not the worst of it,” Icheb said, still keeping his voice down. “They reprogrammed weather control to make it nearly impossible for her to survive. First they sent a blizzard; then they reduced the temperature to extreme levels. The wind chill is -60 degrees Celsius. She’ll have to wear an EV suit just to survive it, and I’m fairly certain they tampered with that, too. They are determined to see her fail this test.”
John raised his eyebrows. “Wow. Guess she really pissed them off with that Kobayashi Maru thing, eh?” Then he turned and yelled across the café. “Hey, waitress!” The Tellarite woman turned around. “Two waters and a plark platter!” he shouted. He glanced at Icheb. “You eating?”
Icheb shook his head. “I had a nutritional supplement earlier. Water is fine.”
“You and your fucking milkshakes,” John muttered, while glancing over to make sure the waitress acknowledged his order – which she did, with an obscene gesture. John returned an even more obscene gesture, and the woman actually laughed – a loud cross between a cackle and a snort that irritated Icheb’s already aching ears.
“Anyway,” John said, returning his attention to Icheb, “I still don’t see how you did anything wrong. I mean, I’d feel bad, too, but they ordered you to do it. And it’s not like her life is really in danger. She can just punch out and try again. Besides, it’s not like you have to tell her it was you who locked her out.”
“That’s the problem,” Icheb said. “I already did.”
John narrowed his eyes in confusion, and reached up to ruffle a hand through his sandy blond hair, which was, as usual, badly in need of a trim. “Wait, you broke protocol?” he asked. “How the hell did you even reach her? I thought comms were cut off during the test.”
“They are,” Icheb said. “I didn’t speak to her directly. But I did everything I could to help her, and I left her a message of sorts in the code. A warning.”
John’s eyes widened slightly. “No one caught it?”
Icheb shook his head. “They couldn’t decrypt it. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have looked like a message, because it wasn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” John said.
Icheb sighed. “I know. I’ll try to explain.” He paused briefly to collect his thoughts. “I knew the first thing she would do is reprogram the pod, which is why they ordered me to lock her out. But then they told me that if she could break the encryption, they wanted the pod to shut down completely. Power, environmental controls, life support, everything. So I programmed fourteen layers of encryption to lock her out of the controls. I made the first thirteen layers extremely difficult. I was hoping to buy her some time. The last layer was by far the most difficult, but I knew she would recognize it, because we wrote the code together. I hoped it would serve as a warning not to go any further.” He paused and smirked slightly. “I also stocked her food supply with 13B.”
John laughed at that. “You bastard,” he said. “You know how much she hates that stuff. But the coding? That’s some holonovel spy shit right there,” he added, clearly impressed. “Did it work?”
Icheb nodded. “She understood immediately. She pretended to try to break the code, but she intentionally used algorithms she knew would fail. Fortunately, it was late at night, so she went to sleep soon after.”
“And now?”
“When I left to meet you, she was on foot, walking toward Alert, Nunavut. She’s wearing an EV suit. I’m uncertain how long it’s rated for. She has less than three hours of daylight left.”
“How far a walk is it?”
“18 kilometers. But she’s walking on sea ice covered with nearly a meter of freshly-fallen snow.”
“Jesus, they aren’t fucking around. They really want her to fail this thing.”
Icheb nodded sullenly.
“What are you so worried about, then?” John asked. “She’s going to punch out, and as far as they’re concerned, you’ll have given them exactly what they wanted.”
Icheb shook his head. “She won’t activate the emergency beacon. She’d rather freeze to death than fail. You know that.” John grew quiet, knowing he was right.
“I’m not entirely convinced she will fail,” said Icheb, “but I’m worried that if she succeeds, they’ll discover that I helped her. Commander Schmidt is already suspicious because she was able to decrypt the first thirteen lockout codes so quickly. He told me last night that if he finds any evidence I tried to assist her, he’ll tell Command to keep us assigned separately for the rest of our careers. He called it my ‘post-Academy psych exam.’”
John’s eyes widened. “Can he do that?”
Icheb shrugged slightly. “He certainly seems to believe he can.”
“What if you got married?” John asked. Icheb wasn’t surprised by the question. He had already told John about his intention to propose to Maren.
“It wouldn’t necessarily matter,” he said. “There’s precedent for spouses being assigned separately for similar reasons.”
“Do you really think he’ll find out?” John asked.
Icheb sighed. “I don’t know.”
The Tellarite waitress chose that moment to unceremoniously deposit a large plate of plark in front of John, along with two glasses of water. “Here you go, Terran.” She spat his species like a curse word.
“Thanks, pigface,” John retorted cheerfully, offering the woman another rude gesture. She laughed again and walked away. Icheb could swear he saw her put a little extra sway into her broad hips as she did.
“You’re a proficient flirt in every language,” he told John, with just a little touch of awe. “I don’t understand how you do it.”
John shrugged and dug into the pile of meat on his plate. “Necessity,” he said, through a mouthful of food. “You know, some of us just haven’t figured out how to convince the perfect girl to worship us for life.”
Icheb picked up his glass and took a sip of water. Quality over quantity, he thought, feeling grateful for Maren. “So, what should I do?” he asked, as he set his glass back down.
John looked up in surprise and almost choked. “You’re asking me for career advice?”
“Yes,” Icheb said earnestly. “I can’t talk to just anyone about this, and I trust you not to share any of the information I’ve given you. You know that would hurt Maren just as much as it would damage me.”
John nodded thoughtfully, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve (since Tellarites didn’t believe in napkins). “I think,” he said slowly, “that you should keep your fucking mouth shut. You shouldn’t even have told me about this. I mean, I won’t say anything, but Christ, Icheb, Schmidt is not a guy you want to fuck around with. If he figures out what you did, he’ll do everything he can to ruin you. That guy is legendary. He takes pride in his work. If he thinks he was outsmarted by a couple of twenty-somethings – ”
“I’m 19,” Icheb reminded him.
“Whatever. That’s even worse,” John said. “In any case, you just have to keep your mouth shut. It’s the only thing you can do.” He trailed off for a moment and, his blue eyes took on a distant look. “Or maybe it’s not,” he said.
“What do you mean?” asked Icheb. “Clarify.”
“You can help him make sure she fails. It’s not too late to fuck with her, is it? I mean, I know it sounds cold, but it’s for the greater good. After all the two of you have been through, the last thing you need is some asshole at Command trying to keep you apart.”
Icheb frowned and stared at his nearly-full water glass. What John was saying was rational, but he hated it. He couldn’t bear the idea of working with the sadistic commander to torment Maren. All of his efforts thus far had felt like an effort to subvert Schmidt’s dark impulses and mitigate the potential damage to Maren. Now, John was suggesting he assist the man.
“It’s not too late,” Icheb said, after a long silence. Abruptly, he stood up. “I’ve been gone too long,” he said. “I want to get back there and see how she’s doing. I’ll pay for your breakfast on the way out. Thanks for coming up here.”
“Wait, so what are you going to do?” John asked. “Are you going to help him?”
Icheb met his gaze. The truth was, he had no idea what he was going to do, and wouldn’t be able to decide until he saw her progress. “I’m going to check on Maren,” he said.
John set his lips into a grim line and nodded. “You do what you have to do, Icheb,” he said. “But be careful. Schmidt’s not a guy you want to cross.”
Icheb thought of the twisted smile on the man’s face whenever he thought Maren was suffering. “Trust me, I know,” he told John. He walked over to the cashier, scanned his ID, and gave the waitress a fifty-credit tip on account of John’s flirting, as a joke. She was sure to throw herself at John now, a spectacle he was sorry he could not stay to watch. You have a sadistic side of your own, you know, he realized, as he smiled at the thought of John trying to let the hideous, foul-mouthed, sour-smelling woman down easy.
Still, even if he did have a sadistic streak, there was no way he could imagine using it on Maren.