Chapter Text
He likes Tyler, he’s decided. They run battle simulations while he calls out strategies and questions Tyler about every facet of his life, and Tyler gets 36 kills to his 24 and lies about it. “Captain, out of respect—” Tyler starts to say.
“Don’t apologize for excellence. I want my chief of security to shoot better than I do.” As long as they’re never shooting at him, and he doesn’t think Tyler ever will be. He’s grateful, eager to please—too eager to please, even—and hungry to make up the seven months lost since the Battle of the Binaries.
Tyler runs after him. “You offering me a slot, captain?”
“Well, I figure I’ve seen you fly, shoot, fight like a Klingon…”
“Klingon guards beating on me for seven months, I was bound to pick something up.”
“Most people would’ve given up. You learned.” He remembers Landry and says, “My last chief of security and I went through a lot together.” His Landry was probably dead, and this universe’s Landry had died trying to saw the claws off a monster. “I need someone I can trust, someone that understands war. What it takes to survive, what it takes to win. I think that’s you. Is it?”
“I’d be honored to serve on the Discovery,” Tyler says, and his answer was never in doubt. “I won’t let you down, sir.”
“Good,” he says, and claps Tyler on the shoulder. He leaves it to Tyler to imagine the consequences of failure.
Of course he doesn’t trust easily; he watches Tyler, watches the video feed from the mess hall where he sits alone, watches as Cadet Tilly leads Burnham over to his table and introduces them both. Tyler talks about judging people in the here and now and offers his hand. Burnham takes it and then she stands slowly, clutches her side, screams in pain, and collapses from something no one else can see. He’s never seen her show pain before and it’s terrifying to watch.
Culber saves him from appearing in sickbay unsummoned by paging him almost immediately. Lorca is there when Burnham wakes up gasping “Sarek,” her vital signs spiking.
“What’s the matter with her?”
Culber can’t tell him, but she says, “It’s not me, it’s Sarek. He’s in trouble.”
“How do you know that?”
“I share part of his katra, his eternal life force.” Something Vulcan.
“How can you share a soul with Sarek? You’re not Vulcan.”
“I was raised as one,” she says, as if they couldn’t all tell. “After my parents were killed at a Vulcan outpost—”
“Sarek and his human wife Amanda took you in. Your story’s well documented.” Written into everything she said, the way she moved, the way she thought. It was maybe the sharpest divergence from the Michael he’d known—her parents died somewhere, before the Emperor adopted her, but he’d never known where or why.
“He believed I could serve as humanity’s potential,” she says, and there’s the pain again.
“How could he put that kind of pressure on a child?” Tilly is blunt and overly emotional, but it seems to work with Burnham.
She explains her second round of childhood terror, the extremist attempt to kill her to keep humans out of their culture. “I was dead for three minutes. The katra, it has a healing power. Sarek used it to save me. A kind of soul graft. It’s a procedure that’s frowned upon, and rare.”
Lorca can only imagine. “So you’re…linked with him. He gets wounded, you feel pain.” She nods, and he can tell from the way all her muscles are tensed that she’s still in pain. “This has happened to you before?”
“Once. The start of the war. He sensed my distress and came to me. But this is different, I can feel him slipping away.” Burnham’s words speed up, building—he would call it panic on anyone else. “I don’t think this is a conscious effort on his part. Sarek is delirious, he might be dying.” She’s been speaking to all of them, but now she looks at him alone. “Captain,” she says, “please.” It’s hard for her to say. “Captain, help me find him.”
Lorca can’t help but nod, even as he knows he’ll be forbidden from doing so. He thinks it’s the first time Burnham has asked him for anything. It doesn’t occur to him to refuse.
Just as he expected, there was some kind of Vulcan plan organized outside of Starfleet to win the war without the help of inferior humans and Sarek is deep in it. “Vulcans went behind Starfleet’s back because they thought they could clean up our ‘illogical’ mess? So where is the ambassador right now?”
Starfleet is assessing, they say. Figuring out what to do—if Burnham is right, Sarek will be long dead before Starfleet does anything. He doesn’t know what will happen to Burnham if Sarek dies, if the katra will just disappear from her, or be absorbed somehow, or will it kill her too?
“I’ll go get him,” he tells the Starfleet Vulcan, whatever his name is, who exclaims, “Absolutely not!”
“You can tell the Vulcans they’re welcome – I’m happy to clean up their mess.” Lorca ends the transmission with some satisfaction as the Vulcan is still protesting. Then he picks up a fortune cookie, smashes it between two hands, and eats a fragment. They don’t contain fortunes anymore, the ones he has—and anyway, he knows what the universe has to offer him.
Sarek himself doesn’t matter to him—one more Vulcan from a planet full of them. Sarek as an ambassador who could help end the war—more important. The sooner the war ends, the sooner Starfleet stops hand-wringing about the risk of the Klingons capturing Discovery and gives him truly free rein. But he would be lying to himself if he said that he was about to embark on this unsanctioned mission for any reason other than that Sarek is Burnham’s father and Burnham said please and—well, the honest list ends there.
They jump to the nebula where Sarek is drifting. A small part of him wonders what Burnham would have done if they were still slowly killing the tardigrade for each jump—whether she would have delayed to search for a solution, as she’d tried to delay his rescue, or stolen a shuttle and tried to do it all herself. It doesn’t really matter.
The nebula is beautiful the way that all deadly things are and painful to see. Burnham walks onto the bridge, still in obvious pain—it must be terrible, for her to show it—and he asks, “How are you feeling?”
“I still sense Sarek, but it’s growing erratic. I think he’s getting worse.” Not an answer to his question, but hard to imagine she'd admit to anything else.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get him back,” he says, and she actually seems to believe him.
Of course Saru says that the nebula has killed their sensors. Of course. “Send out probes,” he tells Saru. “Scan sector by sector.” Saru protests that it could take months, and he asks, “Any other options?”
“Me,” Burnham says. Of course.
* * *
Stamets is excited about the idea, of course. “You’re talking about building a synthetic mind-meld augment. Groovy!”
“Clearly, your trip down the mycelium path has lightened your mood, lieutenant.” It almost makes him miss Stamets from a month ago, who would have come up with fifteen different technical reasons not to try it.
“Once you’re past getting stabbed by needles, it’s pretty great.” Then he describes a technical plan that includes the phrase “sure, why not?” and babbles about the wonders of katras until Lorca stops him. Of course, it’s only after Stamets has said it’s all wonderful and possible and like a hit of speed that he adds, “Radioactive interference from the nebula is going to diffuse your signal. You’ll never be able to maintain a strong enough connection with Sarek from out here.”
Lorca is very tired of this. “So we take the Discovery inside the nebula and get closer to him.”
No, Stamets has a reason that that won’t work too. Of course it comes down to Burnham saying, “So we go in with a shuttle.”
“You’d have to fly into that soup with nothing but hope and a prayer,” Stamets says. “Are you really that crazy?”
She raises an eyebrow. Of course she is. She tells him that the shuttle shields will protect her and that she wants Tilly—Cadet Tilly!—there with her to work the machine and provide moral support. The request for moral support alone tells him how desperate this mission is.
“You’ll get it. And you need a pilot who can fly you through that storm and, more importantly, get you out alive. Luckily, I know a guy.”
They’re loading up the equipment in the shuttle when Lorca walks on. He nods to Cadet Tilly, who responds with the appropriate “Sir!” He walks past Burnham without a word, straight up to Tyler, and tells him, “Bring her back in one piece.”
Tyler nods and assures him, “Not a scratch.” He puts a confident hand on the shuttle.
“I’m talking about her.” He lets Tyler follow his gaze to Burnham and waits for it to sink in. “Or don’t come back at all.” He pats Tyler on the shoulder and then walks back out past Burnham without a word. He’s not sure what he’d say to her if he did speak, and he doubts that it would matter to her; all he can do is impress upon Tyler that he, personally, expects Tyler to put Burnham’s safety above all other priorities.
Then, while he’s trying to distract himself, Cornwell decides to arrive. He’s barely stepped into the ready room when she says, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I thought Terral was going to throw a fit, and he’s a damn Vulcan!”
“I did what I thought was best.” He can’t explain why to her, though. Let her think it’s because Sarek is so important to peace.
Cornwell doesn’t think his opinion is good enough. “You launched an unauthorized rescue mission using a convicted mutineer! Not to mention a P.O.W. who has barely had time to recover. Can you even trust this guy?”
He resorts to the proprieties they love so much. “Yes, Admiral, I checked him out. Lieutenant Tyler graduated with honors from the Academy before he saved my life.” And Lorca saved his life in turn, which means that Tyler is his now.
“You are captain of the most advanced ship in the fleet, the cornerstone of our defense against the Klingons! You cannot treat Discovery like it’s your own fiefdom!” She tells him to stop making enemies on his own side—but there’s no side beyond this ship that’s behind him. Discovery and his crew are the only ones he can depend on, and that’s truer every day.
“What are you doing here? What’s really going on?” They’ve diverted her entire ship here, away from battle, to—scold him? Knock him down a peg?
“I came to see my friend.” And there’s the danger, when she steps outside of the relationship he can read in the files and wants to talk to Lorca, not Captain Lorca.
“Okay. Why don’t we stop talking like Starfleet officers, Kat, and start talking like friends?” Kat, he thinks, is appropriate to whoever she believes Gabriel Lorca is. He pulls out a bottle of Scotch and offers it. The Lorca she thinks she knows seems like the kind of man who would have drunk Scotch with an admiral friend.
But she’s digging for something. They toast, and she reminisces about finishing a bottle together watching the Perseids meteor shower, asks if he remembers, and he tries to smooth past it. Cornwell is someone from this Lorca’s past and every time they step outside rank, he has to watch for traps.
“We were so young, with grand plans for the future.” She’s a little misty. He wants to believe she’s sincere.
“Well, some of us still have.”
“I know.” She waits, then says, “I worry about you, Gabriel. Some of the decisions you’ve been making recently have been…troubling.”
He tries to deflect. “Well, war doesn’t provide too many opportunities for niceties.” He’s not paying as much attention to this conversation as he should be, waiting to hear something from Saru that the mission has succeeded, that Burnham is home safe.
“You’re pushing this crew. You’re putting the ship in harm’s way. You’ve been ignoring orders.”
“I’m in the front line, Kat. You’ve got to make decisions in a second, sometimes less.”
She’s unconvinced. She tells him he hasn’t been the same since the Buran—truer and truer. He can’t even say he’s the same Lorca who stumbled into this universe off his Buran. She brushes off the successful psych evals and asks how he’s feeling, after being tortured.
Lorca can’t help but laugh at that. “Are we in session? Because I didn’t know you were practicing again.” She smiles. “If I have your undivided attention for fifty minutes…” He sets down his glass and leans in. “I can think of a whole bunch of other things we could be doing.” Of course it’s not in any records, but he can read a person well enough to be pretty sure of this history between them. He lays a hand on her knee and he’s right, of course. She stands up and takes off her pin.
The funny thing is that it almost does feel familiar, even though they’ve never done this. She’s generous, affectionate, stroking his face and sliding her hands over his shoulders, his chest, smiling almost sadly as they move together. Lorca regrets momentarily whatever he’ll have to do to her to keep his ship.
It’s a testament to how this universe has softened him that he falls asleep with another person in his bed and wakes up with his hand around her throat and a phaser to her head. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he knows it’s too late to salvage the situation. “I’m sorry, I’m not used to having anyone in my bed.” He shouldn’t have let himself drop his guard, shouldn’t have let Burnham’s absence distract him from caution—she’s a tool, she’s supposed to be a tool, but he’s rapidly losing control of that.
Cornwell shoves him off. “You sleep with a phaser in your bed, and you say nothing’s wrong?” He tries to stop her, but she says, “All these months, I have ignored the signs, but I can’t anymore. The truth is you are not the man I used to know.”
“Of course I am,” he says.
She knows he isn’t, though. She tells him that he lied on his psych evals, he’s blinded everyone else, and that this, tonight, showed it. “Now I see that it’s even worse than I thought. Your behavior is pathological. That’s what tonight was, right? Trying to get me to back off? Because it sure wasn’t what it was like before.” He wonders what it was like, with her Lorca, as she zips her uniform back on and replaces the pin. He’d tried to play whoever that man had been, but clearly he hadn’t succeeded. “This is bigger than us. You said it yourself, we’re at war. I can’t leave Starfleet’s most powerful weapon in the hands of a broken man.”
“Don’t take my ship away from me. She’s all I’ve got.” He’s been still, trying not to spook her, but now he leaps off the bed and follows her to the door. “Please, I’m begging you.” He can’t let himself panic. He tries to tell her what she wants to hear--“You’re right, it’s been harder on me than I let on, and I lied about everything, and I need help.”
“I hate that I can’t tell if this is really you,” she says, and he never should have done it, never should have tried to slip into whatever familiarity she had with her Lorca, because it’s falling apart faster than it would have otherwise. She walks out the door. He’s still reeling from it when Saru comms to tell him that they have Lieutenant Tyler, they have Sarek—says nothing about Burnham but she must be all right, Saru would have said it she was injured—and he’s on his way to sickbay.
Burnham is safe. And, standing outside of sickbay, she presents the solution to all his problems. “He’ll live,” she says, watching Sarek, “but Dr. Culber says he can’t meet the Klingons in his condition. The window for the talks closes in a few hours. Even if the Federation wanted to step in, they couldn’t get there in time.”
But Cornwell can, and Lorca sees how it will go now—she’ll take any chance, however obvious a trap it is, and she’ll leave this ship before she can take it from him. Burnham turns to face him as he talks it through. “You did well, Burnham,” he says. “You should be proud.”
She looks at Sarek through the glass. “As much as it would displease my Vulcan mentor, I’m feeling a lot of emotions right now.” And willing to admit it—she must be drowning in them. “I’m not sure pride is one of them.” She turns back to him and says, “But I do want to thank you. Sir, you didn’t have to mount this rescue mission for Sarek.”
“I didn’t do it for him,” he says. It’s the most obvious thing in the world—he moved heaven and earth and Starfleet’s most powerful ship to rescue her father, not to save an ambassador—but she looks surprised somehow at the implication. He’s caught off-guard and waits too long before trying to change course, saying, “I need a team around me that’s going to help me carry the day, and that includes you. So I’d like to make it official. There’s a post waiting for you on the bridge—science specialist. Don’t even think about saying no.”
Lorca expects her to try to decline the way she has every other thing he’s offered, but she says “I accept” on the heels of his offer. He turns to walk away and her voice catches him. “I’m grateful to serve under a captain like you.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that. Finally, all he can manage is a half-smile and a nod. He didn’t do it for Sarek. She’s grateful to serve under a captain like him. He didn’t do it for Sarek.
Cornwell agrees to the summit like he knew she would. As she leaves, she tells him, “I don’t want to ruin your career. When I return, we’ll talk about how you step down. And after you get some help, maybe we’ll talk about how you get back in that chair.”
He doesn't bother to argue. Instead he tells her, “May fortune favor the bold, Admiral. Good luck with your negotiation.” He knows it’s probably a trap, and he has to want it to be a trap to save himself, but he genuinely regrets that she’s the one who has to be caught in it. If she weren’t such a threat, he might have tried to persuade her not to go—to send someone less important, someone who hadn’t stroked his cheek in the dark and said “Gabriel” softly, kindly.
* * *
It is a trap. Was there really ever any doubt? Even if the Klingons would have negotiated with the Vulcans, they would never have talked terms with a Starfleet admiral. (He admits that this belief is primarily based on his experience of Vulcans and Klingons in his own universe, but it seems likely here too.)
Saru brings him the news, clearly expecting a black alert and an immediate rescue mission. After all, they just used the spore drive for an expressly forbidden rescue and used experimental mental augmentation to locate someone who wasn’t even a member of Starfleet, and before that used illegal genetic manipulation to effect another rescue in Klingon space. Their directive might as well be search and rescue, at this point.
“Notify Starfleet Command. Ask for orders.” At Saru’s shocked expression, Lorca adds, “Is there a problem?”
His threat ganglia must be fully raised by now. Saru has made clear that he would prefer a different captain, one less inclined to violate orders and bring on mutineers—not aloud, of course, because he would never say such a thing, but in every gesture and response and tone of disapproval when Lorca gives orders. “In the past…we have engaged in alternative thinking in these matters.”
Lorca needs him to believe that this new hesitance is based on Starfleet’s most recent attempt to rein him in, not that there’s some reason he wants to leave Cornwell in Klingon hands. “What if we go after her and it’s another trap, Mr. Saru? Did you consider that? Starfleet can’t afford to lose the Discovery—she’s bigger than all of us.” There, that was the party line, the explanation that should satisfy Saru’s lingering fears by hewing to Starfleet Command’s instructions. “If so ordered, we will try and rescue the admiral, but not without authorization.” And Starfleet probably won’t authorize it—it’s one thing to send the Discovery after him, her captain, when he has intimate knowledge of her workings, and Cornwell is important, but she isn’t in charge of the cornerstone of their defense.
“I will hail Starfleet now, sir,” Saru says. Who would he take his concerns to, anyway? He wouldn’t trust Burnham the mutineer with unease about the captain, not when he seems to think she’s always on the verge of mutiny. And not the new chief of security, who is Lorca’s creature through and through. Stamets is too high on the mycelial network and Lorca is the one who keeps him on it. Everyone else is too afraid of Lorca to question him. No, he’s safe here—his own fiefdom, his own universe. Discovery is safe from Starfleet as long as he’s on board.
After Saru leaves, Lorca stares at the stars through the windows in his quarters. He doesn’t fear danger on this ship, but the phaser is comforting at the small of his back. This universe may be softening him, but he would have done the same thing even to Burnham if she’d touched him in the middle of the night. Michael had liked to wake him sometimes, if he’d fallen asleep in her bed, for the adrenaline rush of it. He doesn’t fall asleep in beds that aren’t his own anymore.
Lorca can admit—to himself alone, never aloud—that he’d loved Michael, for however he’d defined love in his universe. She’d been ablaze, an ion storm, a warp core on the verge of overload, bloody lips and burning hands, laughing easily, feelings always clear. They’d used each other as tools, of course, but he’d always thought it was far more than that.
He doesn’t know what it would be like in this universe.