Chapter Text
“Are you joking?” She adds, “Captain?”
Lorca looks nonplussed. “I’m not known for joking, Lieutenant.” He crosses his arms across his chest and looks almost suspicious. “You don’t want the job?”
“You know I’m not really chief material,” Elan tells him. “I’m not going to be polite and tell you that I think all your ideas are good. I think a lot of your ideas are bad.”
Lorca actually laughs at that, though she thinks it’s probably more in surprise than actual humor. “Lieutenant Riley was optimistic about you.”
“Riley is a filthy liar and is the one you should be putting in charge of this mess.” Too late, she remembers that maybe he won’t appreciate her referring to the security situation as a mess. One more reason that she’s not a good fit. “Tyler was useless as chief. There are barely enough people in security for a ship half this size, and we’re the only ones who ever seem to die.”
“It sounds like you have strong feelings,” Lorca says mildly.
She gestures expansively. “Have you met an Andorian before? We have all the feelings! There’s a reason I’ve never been made chief! They barely let Yaras be a captain!”
“Yaras.” He turns the name over in his mouth. “Your former captain?”
“For almost fifteen years. Our ship went down at the Battle of the Binaries.” Elan laughs. “I think you and I met right after, at the starbase where they put everyone too damaged to go right back out onto a ship.”
“Look,” he says, rubbing one hand over his face. “I’m not Yaras. I’m probably not much better than I was when we met, which I don’t remember. But I need a new chief of security, and I need someone who thinks differently than I do.”
Elan shrugs. She knows how to be a proper Starfleet officer, but she wants him to know what he’s getting into. “If you insist.” She smiles at him and bares her teeth just a little. “Gabe.” She turns and walks out.
Gabe—she’s going to call him that until he fires her—apparently can’t come up with an appropriate response.
* * * * *
Gabe is still taking her measure. He forces her to write reports about the status of the security team, a thing she’d hoped to never, ever have to do. When she complains—“I’m not in security because I’m good at writing reports!”—he says, “Well, all right, why don’t you go down to the surface” and sends her down with away missions.
“Please cease what you are doing,” T’Lac tells her. Elan has her feet up on the control panel of the shuttle—not touching anything important, of course—and is fidgeting with a knife that she liberated from Gabe’s war room. It’s a pretty thing, made of an unfamiliar metal that gives off occasional tiny shocks.
“Why?”
“You are diverting my attention,” and Elan thinks that that might be the sweetest thing T’Lac has ever said to her.
“I wouldn’t want to do that.” She does stop, though. “We’ve only got another thirty minutes down here, T’Lac. Finish up collecting your samples and get your people back here.”
“We will require another seventy-five minutes. There is more extensive megaflora on this planet than was apparent on sensors.”
Elan sits upright. “No, thirty minutes,” she repeats. “That’s what the captain gave you.”
“And you obey the captain’s timelines scrupulously?” If she didn’t know that Vulcans don’t smile, she’d think T’Lac was smiling a little as she says it.
“I’m trying to get back on his good side!” Elan protests. “Well, get on his good side.”
“It is unlikely that an additional forty-five minutes will alter his opinion of you.” T’Lac taps something on her PADD and stands. “My presence is required at one of the sample sites.”
Elan stands up too. “Great, I’ll come with. I’ll accompany you,” she amends.
It’s good that she does, because no sooner does T’Lac join two of the other scientists at the foot of a giant plant than all three are somehow swallowed up entirely into the bulbous mass. Elan yells and shoots it, with no effect. Then she remembers Gabe’s knife and tries an experimental slice; the plant shudders and shrinks away from the metal even as its skin opens cleanly beneath the blade. It takes her twenty very tense minutes of hacking and—peeling, for lack of a better word—to open things up enough that she can grab T’Lac by the hand and drag her out, covered in some kind of iridescent pollen. The other two scientists follow.
T'Lac is angry beneath her Vulcan exterior, and the pollen glints on her pale skin. She splutters a little. Elan can’t resist brushing some of it off T’Lac’s shoulder. “I don’t care what you do to delay,” Elan says, “we’re going back to the ship on time.”
Every away mission with T’Lac seems to go that way. T’Lac finds some new way to extend the length of the mission, whether it’s getting swallowed by sparkling plants or falling into quicksand or getting wrapped up by vines. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you enjoyed this,” Elan complains. She certainly enjoys it, getting to do something more than run their limited security teams through drills and write reports about those drills.
“I appreciate these little treats you give me, Gabe, I do,” she tells him, still half-covered in mud. It’s dripping on the floor of his ready room and he looks less and less annoyed every time. “Shoot something, chop something, save the girl—” All right, she didn’t mean to say that last one. “It’s like you want to keep me happy as your chief.”
“Well, I have to make up for all the reports somehow,” Gabe says. “You seem to be having a lot of fun.” He’s starting to loosen up a little, at long last.
“You know, I am. Except T’Lac keeps making things difficult. She’s always the one finding the trouble.” Elan is still amped up from the last mission. “I suppose you’ve got a lot of paperwork to do?”
He raises an eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”
“You could come down to the security division and run some close-combat simulations with me,” she offers.
“Go take a shower,” he says. His voice sounds almost affectionate. “You’re getting mud on my ready room floor.”