Chapter Text
Part Three (Cont’d)
Shuttlepod Kendra gently hung next to the wispy tendrils of the Kervala nebula as the swirling vista continued to endlessly coalesce and separate in front of the tiny ship.
But it had been some time since either of the shuttle’s occupants had bothered to gaze out at the picturesque view itself. As soon as their impromptu picnic brunch had started, the conversation had begun to flow.
Unlike the entirely public and formal setting of their attempt at dinner together back on Kervala Prime, Denella was finding this environment significantly more relaxing and easy to manage, which meant that she had actually started to enjoy herself. She had even found that she had moved away from exclusively telling anecdotes about various engineering solutions that she had come up with during her life, and moved onto stories that seemed to keep Erami’s attention a little more easily.
To underline that particular point, as they sat on the blanket and picked at the banquet of delicacies that Erami had hastily replicated, the Bajoran woman threw her head back and laughed out loud in response to Denella’s latest story, filling the cockpit with the sound of joy.
“You’re kidding me,” she chuckled as she chewed on a piece of mapa bread, “The Sheliak Corporate have a bounty…on the Bounty?”
“That’s why we don’t talk about it much,” Denella replied, as she popped a slice of kava fruit into her mouth, “Cos it sounds so stupid. But, yeah, we tend to give that whole area of space a wide berth these days.”
Erami laughed again and shook her head. “Ok, if that’s really true, and I’m still not entirely sure you’re not winding me up, then I really don’t think it’s fair for you to have given me such a hard time for falling out with a few Pakleds.”
“Huh. Falling out with them? Interesting. So we’re past ‘just a big misunderstanding’?”
“You really don’t quit, do you?”
“Call me old fashioned,” Denella shrugged, “But if I’m getting disruptors pointed at me, I like to know whether I deserve it or not.”
She looked back at the Bajoran with a friendly but determined edge to her demeanour. She still wanted an answer. Erami toyed with the remains of the piece of bread in her hand, then grimaced and sighed in defeat.
“Ugh, fine, ok. I may have…relieved Grumtrag and his merry men of something of theirs a few weeks ago.”
“So you did steal something?”
“I mean,” the Bajoran muttered, “If you wanna put a label on it…”
“What was it?” Denella pressed, happy to be finally getting some answers about what exactly she had stumbled into the middle of.
“That’s not important.”
“Seems to be important to them?”
“Ugh,” Erami sighed with a frustrated smile, “Look, they weren’t even using it. You know what they’re like. Their ships are full of junk they buy, or steal, or find somewhere. And they have no idea what to do with most of it. Plus I really didn’t think they’d go this far to track me down.”
She paused and smiled ruefully for a moment.
“Then again, I guess they figured it was a pretty good bet that I’d wind up swinging back by Kervala Prime sooner or later. I’m never too far away from this place.”
“Why?” Denella asked with genuine interest as she sipped from a glass of sweet springwine.
Erami looked up at her, then jabbed a finger at something over the Orion’s right shoulder. “Cos of that.”
Denella turned to see the Kervala nebula in all of its glory through the cockpit window, still bathing the room in a pinkish glow. For a second, she found herself captivated by it all over again.
She had been flying around space for long enough for nebulae to be a run of the mill sight. Usually, she only really saw them as either a nuisance, a phenomenon likely to send sensor readings haywire or cause corrosion to the Bounty’s bussard collectors, or as a threat, a hiding place for bandits and other nefarious elements, ready to spring a trap on an unsuspecting passing ship.
But there was something about this one that seemed to captivate her. To the point that she didn’t even care that, for the second time in two days, she had allowed herself to turn her back on a woman that she still didn’t feel she entirely trusted.
“I guess I can see why,” she mused, a little in awe, “It’s incredible.”
“Yep,” Erami nodded in agreement, “But it’s more than that. When I was little, growing up in that labour camp back on Bajor, there wasn’t a lot of beauty around. Except, on a clear night, among all the stars, you could just about make out this tiny little speck of pink.”
Denella turned back to see an unmistakable trace of emotion playing across Erami’s features. For some reason, she found it hit home with herself harder than she’d expected.
“Whenever we saw it, my mother used to tell me it was the most beautiful thing in the whole universe. A…jewel of the prophets. That was what she called it.”
She scoffed slightly at the memory and took a sip from her own glass to compose herself.
“Anyway, I guess it kept me going more times than I can remember during the occupation. Even after I’d grown up. Seeing that little pink speck out there in the cosmos was…I dunno. A comfort. And once it was all over, and we’d kicked every last Cardassian out of town, the first thing I wanted to do was get myself up into deep space, and come and see it for myself.”
“Long way from Bajor,” Denella whispered. She had forgotten all about the food and drink in front of her, focused entirely on her dining companion’s story.
“Yeah. Tell me about it. Took weeks to get all the way out here. And every minute I was sat in that old beaten up Bajoran transport, I was terrified.”
“Terrified?”
“Yeah. Cos I thought there was no way this ‘jewel of the Prophets’ was actually gonna be as perfect as my mother said it was. As perfect as I’d pictured it being whenever I saw it up in the sky back on Bajor. Then, the captain came to tell us we were making a pass of the nebula, and I swear I pushed a couple of dozen people out of the way to get a look out of the windows. And…there it was.”
She smiled wistfully at the view out of the window, and almost lost herself in a pang of emotion for a second, before she managed to stifle the sob that had rushed forwards and took a long gulp of springwine to rediscover her more usual casual demeanour.
Without thinking, Denella went to reach out her hand to Erami’s to comfort her. But she stopped herself short of actually making contact and quickly withdrew it again. If the Bajoran noticed her movement, she kept it to herself.
“Sorry,” Erami continued after she finished composing herself, “Guess I can’t help myself, can I? Try to keep things light and breezy, and then out come the Occupation stories.”
They shared a smile as a moment of silence descended. Then, Denella felt a curious urge inside of her. Having seen Erami sharing a story of her past, she found herself compelled to reciprocate. She wanted to talk. Or at least, she thought she wanted to.
“I get what you’re saying,” she began, “Orpheus IV was just as beautiful. Rolling hills, clean air, the greenest grass. The view from my parents house across the valley was…spectacular.”
She paused for a second and looked down at the blanket, sadly toying with a stray fibre.
“But I know I’ll never see that again. It’s all Syndicate territory now…”
“Hey,” Erami muttered gently, “You don’t have to talk about all that if you don’t want to—”
“I’ve never told anyone this, But I’ve tried to recreate it. The little area where I grew up. In a holosuite. I’d try programming the whole thing from scratch, or just do the whole ‘Computer, increase grassland coverage by 25%’ or ‘Computer, decrease humidity by 15%’ thing and hope to hit it lucky.”
“Did you hit it lucky?”
“I’ve gotten close once or twice,” she shrugged, surprising herself with how freely the story was flowing, “But I’m an engineer, not a terraformer. I can get the look right. But not the feel of it.”
She grabbed a small berry from one of the bowls on the blanket and rolled it around in her fingers, focusing on that as she went on.
“On Orpheus IV, there are these flowers. And I’ve got no idea how it worked, botanically-speaking, but they used to bloom all year round. In stages. Like a…ripple, flowing slowly across the valley. So, every morning, when you stepped out of the door, you could smell those flowers in the breeze.”
She smiled sadly and clasped the berry into the palm of her hand.
“The holosuite never got the scent of the flowers right. So, no matter how close it got to the real thing, it was always fake to me. So, I dunno, I guess I just gave up.”
Erami nodded thoughtfully for a moment as Denella idly popped the well-rolled berry into her mouth to help her stifle her own rush of emotion.
“You know earlier,” the Bajoran said eventually, “I told you my mother’s kava root stew was my favourite food?”
Denella nodded. Erami smiled sadly and shook her head.
“Well, that’s not really true. I mean, her stew was the best I’ve ever tasted, bar none. But…in the camp, after she died, my father took it upon himself to make it for me and my sister.”
She toyed with a piece of hasperat on her plate as she pictured the memory.
“Wasn’t exactly easy to get the ingredients together in a labour camp, you know? You weren’t even supposed to make our own meals. But the guards used to turn a blind eye. Less scraps they’d have to bother feeding us, I guess. Still, it used to take forever to forage for everything. Maybe once a month we’d get enough together for my father to give it a go.”
Denella propped her head on her knee as she listened to this latest story, captivated again somehow.
“So he’d get a fire going, and even though he was exhausted from another long day in the camp, he’d stand in front of that cooking pot for hours. And…he’d completely screw it up.”
She let out an involuntary chuckle, causing Denella to lift her head up in surprise.
“I mean,” Erami continued, “Every time, he’d find some new thing to mess up. He’d cook it for too long, or not long enough, or he’d forget an ingredient or two. It was crazy how bad he was at cooking. But…that was my favourite kava root stew. Cos no matter how weird it tasted, that man was giving everything he could to try and recreate the memory we had of our mother’s cooking. And that meant it didn’t have to be perfect.”
“So,” Denella muttered, with a glimmer of understanding, “You’re saying…?”
“I’m saying that you shouldn’t give up on making that program of yours. So long as it brings back some good memories, then that’s enough.”
Denella nodded back and smiled, surprised at how easily she had shared that secret. Especially with someone that had knocked her unconscious yesterday.
Erami smiled back, and reached out a hopeful hand across the blanket, leaving it dangling in mid air above the remains of the picnic.
And this time, feeling closer to this relative stranger after their shared stories over the picnic, Denella felt comfortable enough to reach out and take her hand, without such an action being accompanied by the instinctive need to flee.
They held hands and smiled at each other across the Bajoran cuisine.
And as they enjoyed a silent moment of friendship, neither of them even thought to check on the Kendra’s controls, or the silent blip on the main panel. The blip that calmly confirmed that the shuttle’s temperamental sensor array had picked up a ship on long-range scans.
A ship that was getting closer.