Rise of the Federation

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “You know we can’t, Takashi,” she replied over the rain. “I still have duties aboard Endeavour.”

  “Oh, right. I could come with you there . . . oh. No, because . . . need able bodies. Minds.”

  The hitch in Kimura’s voice that would once have been bitter frustration was now worn down to a mix of weariness and resignation. It had been nearly seven months since the battle with V’Las’s insurrectionists on Vulcan had taken his left arm, lung, and kidney and damaged the frontal and parietal lobes of his brain. That had been long enough for Kimura to adjust to his physical and mental impairments and be able to function relatively well, but also long enough for him to realize that his recovery might have gone as far as it ever would. The nerve damage and scarring to his left shoulder made it unlikely that his arm could ever be replaced with a biograft or a fully responsive prosthetic, his fine coordination was shot, and he struggled with problem solving and advance planning, as well as with verbal expression—which was why he hadn’t thought to check the weather forecast before dragging her out here. Hoshi knew that Takashi was still the warm, wise, strong, and gentle man she’d fallen in love with, but his career as a Starfleet armory officer had ended that day on Vulcan. Leaving Endeavour had given him the freedom to propose to her without any question of conflict with their shipboard duties—but her acceptance had come with the understanding that marriage would have to wait until the time was right. And that kind of long-term planning was one of the hardest things for Takashi to keep in mind anymore. They’d had some version of this conversation more than a dozen times now.

  A gust of wind blew the biting rain into their faces, and Takashi moved to shelter her with his burly frame, his lone arm cradling her shoulders. “Sorry,” he said. “My fault we’re out here in this.”

  She chuckled. “I was on Denobula during the monsoon season not that long ago. This is nothing.”

  Her reassurance didn’t cheer him. She belatedly realized that it had been a poor example; she’d been on Denobula for the wedding of Doctor Phlox’s daughter, and Takashi had needed to decline the doctor’s invitation due to his ongoing physical and cognitive therapy. It was a reminder he could have done without. “Shouldn’t coddle me,” he said. “I’m not fragile. You can get mad.”

  “But I’m not,” she said. “If you actually do something to make me mad, I promise you’ll know it.” She laid a hand on his chest. “This is fine. It’s beautiful out here, even with the rain. And this is a good excuse to hold each other close.” She matched action to word, though she didn’t kiss him, mindful of the presence of the souvenir seller and the others sheltering from the rain along with them. “Trust me—I’m having a good time.”

  After a moment, he nodded. “Yes. We should . . . make most of every moment. Until you go out again. And then once you’re back.” His brow furrowed as he contemplated. Plans came slowly to him now, but there was still a keen mind in there. “There’s a hotel with an onsen. Just two blocks. Half as far as the . . . walkway. If we brave the rain for two blocks . . . we can warm up. Wait out the storm in comfort. Yes?”

  She smiled and nodded. A nice hot soak in a public bath sounded wonderful right now. “Yes.”

  As they ran for the hotel, Hoshi resisted the urge to race ahead—in part because his larger frame made a good windbreak for her. Still, at his peak, with his longer legs and armory training, Takashi could have left her in the dust. Impaired as he was now, he was only marginally slower than her best running speed in these conditions. And the slower pace gave them more time to admire the gorgeous lights; if anything, the halos they formed in the surrounding rain made them even more beautiful.

  Fortunately, the hotel offered a konyoku bath, so Hoshi and Takashi were able to bathe together—though not alone, since a number of other tourists visiting the festival had had the same idea. Once she and Takashi had disrobed and cleaned themselves thoroughly in the adjacent washing area, Hoshi noted that the other occupants of the furo were trying not to stare at her fiancé as he lowered himself into the hot, mineral-infused water. Of course, staring would have been rude in any case, but the aversion of their gaze was more self-conscious than usual. Modern medical science had made it fairly rare to see an amputee on Earth, and the extensive scarring along the left side of Takashi’s body had not yet been fully healed, as his treatments to date had prioritized health and functionality over cosmetic concerns.

  Still, Takashi visibly chose not to let it get to him, instead immersing himself both literally and figuratively in the sensory experience of the artificial hot spring. Hoshi sighed loudly as she lowered herself in alongside him, the shock of the heat almost instantly driving any remaining chill from her bones. “Oh, this was a wonderful idea.”

  They just enjoyed the warmth for a while, but in time, once the pair of Zami Rigelian women sitting nearest them had left, Kimura spoke again. “I know you go out again soon . . . but we could still marry. Just a small ceremony. Quick. Before you go.”

  She laughed. “It’s sweet that you want to, Taka-kun. But our parents would never forgive us! Not to mention my little sister. Mitsuki would never speak to me again if I got married while she was off-planet!”

  “Mitsuki would never stop speaking. To anyone. For any reason.”

  “Then I’d never hear the end of her complaining. You know this.”

  “All right. All right. Idle thought.”

  She leaned against his right side. “Sweet thought. Always. Don’t worry—we’ll find the right time.”

  He didn’t say “I hope so.” But she heard it in his silence.

  2166

  1

  January 4, 2166

  U.S.S. Pioneer

  CAROLINE PARIS craned her neck upward to gaze through the pair of portholes on the curving hull above. “Amazing,” she said. “I’ve never seen a Bussard collector this close when I wasn’t in an inspection pod.” The reddish-brown cabochon dome at the fore of Pioneer’s starboard warp nacelle loomed darkly outside the port, powered down but still impressive to see looming just a few meters above her head.

  “It is striking,” Malcolm Reed said. “And with the improved cooling and vibration damping Commander Tizahr has promised, it should remain relatively comfortable in here even during warp operations.” The room in question was a small common area and observation bay on C deck, overlooking the starboard cargo bay.

  “I’m not sure why they even put viewports here,” Paris remarked. “There’s nothing to see but the nacelle cap.”

  “I admit, the Intrepid class is a bit of a kludge,” Reed confessed. “It was an offshoot of the NX class, putting its pieces together more compactly for more efficient warp dynamics, in case the warp-five engine didn’t perform as hoped.”

  “Never apologize for your ship, Captain,” Paris said. “Compared to the antique I’ve been serving on for the past five years, this is a regular hot rod.”

  Reed chuckled. “It occurs to me that much of our conversation would be incomprehensible to people who aren’t fans of old movies.”

  She patted his cheek, leaning in for a conspiratorial whisper. “So much the better. Helps us keep our secrets.”

  Paris had never expected her dalliance with Malcolm Reed to last more than a few nights. He wasn’t her usual type; if anything, his formal, stiff-upper-lip English manner, facial hair, and military bearing reminded her of Captain Shumar, which should have been the opposite of a turn-on. But then, “usual” had gone out the window since her close call on Delta IV last April. It was only recently that she had felt ready to explore that side of herself again, and perhaps she had turned to Malcolm Reed because he seemed safe. Though he was clearly attracted to her, he had his own natural reserve—and some sort of inner hesitancy toward intimacy that reminded Paris of her own. They had not spoken of it, but perhaps their mutual recognition of each other’s restraint had let them both feel that they could pursue a casual involvement without feeling pressured to go further.

  Yet, as they had spent their
time watching movies and playing tennis and talking about their careers, Paris had discovered that there were other things she and Reed had in common. They both loved classic cinema, though Paris had been unable to get Reed to understand her fondness for ancient, youth-oriented adventure serials like Flash Gordon and Captain Proton. They had a similar love of antiques, though Paris’s fancy was vintage toys and games while Reed’s was military hardware and weaponry. They both came from service families with a strong sense of legacy and tradition—though Malcolm had defied his family custom to serve in Starfleet rather than the Royal Navy, while Paris had readily followed the starfaring example of her mother, Argonne, a United Earth Space Probe Agency veteran who had become one of the UE Starfleet’s first flag officers upon its founding in the 2130s, and her older brother, James, who had commanded one of the old Marshall-class ships in the Earth-Romulan War.

  Not that there weren’t plenty of differences between them as well. Paris had always been the class clown, the little sister who’d acted out in defiance of her family’s pressure to perform—and who had maintained her irreverent manner even after embracing her aptitude for the family business, as a way of announcing that it was something she did to please herself instead of anyone else. Reed’s reserved, disciplined style couldn’t have been more different, at least on the surface. But as she got to know him better—particularly today, as she saw him interact with the members of Pioneer’s crew who were on duty during the refits—she realized that he wasn’t as much like Bryce Shumar as she’d initially believed. Shumar could be arrogant, prideful, and judgmental. He was a perfectionist who demanded no less than perfection from those around him. Paris had only earned the license to be informal on the bridge by proving to him that it did nothing to diminish her exemplary performance. But Reed’s perfectionism was more self-directed. She got the sense that it came from a deep insecurity, a need to prove his worth to himself and to others. And so he was slow to judge others, as though he did not feel entitled to do so. He ran a looser ship than she expected and gave his crew plenty of rein—as Paris saw when Reed’s tour led her to main engineering, their next stop after the nacelle cap.

  “No, no, no!” a woman was shouting as they came into the engine room through the heavy forward hatch. “You have to polarize the magnetic field in parallel with the crystal impurities to reduce the unspent reactants! Calibrate each chamber individually, like this.” The speaker, standing on the raised control platform before the warp reactor, elbowed a fellow engineer aside to enter the settings herself. She was a Jelna Rigelian, craggy-faced and parchment-skinned—an exofemale, if Paris remembered their four-gendered system correctly—but her streaked gray-white hair was cut short and lacked the elaborate beads commonly worn by her people. She wore a red-brown tunic with lieutenant commander’s stripes and a Pioneer mission patch on the shoulder. Paris was still getting used to seeing those two-piece uniforms on Pioneer’s crew. They had been in use fleetwide for several years now, the Class A uniforms meant to stand for the entire Federation fleet—but the member fleets’ individual uniforms had not been entirely phased out, and Shumar was one of a number of human captains who preferred his crew to wear the one-piece gray uniforms of the Earth division, as Paris did now. No doubt Reed favored the fleetwide uniform due to the greater species diversity of his crew.

  Completing the recalibration, the Rigelian engineer ordered the ensign next to her to run a simulation of core performance. She frowned at the result. “No, didn’t I say you need to adjust the injector pressure to compensate? Here, like this!” She clambered down off the platform and headed for the port injector frame, where the crewman tending to the injectors hastily stood aside to make room for her. “There. See?” she asked a few moments later. “Now try it.”

  “Commander Tizahr,” Reed spoke up, drawing the exofemale’s attention. “A word, if you please.”

  “Captain, I’m sure you think you have something important to contribute, but just let me get through with this—”

  “Now, Commander.” Tensing at the steel in his voice, Tizahr relented and came over to them, though her lean body practically trembled with impatience. Paris realized that, despite the impression created by her pale coloring and craggy features, she was unusually young for an officer of her rank.

  “Lieutenant Commander Kivei Tizahr,” Reed continued, “this is my guest, Commander Caroline Paris, first officer of Essex. Caroline, Commander Tizahr is Pioneer’s new chief engineer.”

  Paris extended a hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Tizahr took her hand with a wry smirk. “Which means that either you already know my work, or you know nothing about me personally. Stick around, you’ll probably get less pleased by the moment. Now, Captain, is there anything of actual relevance you have to say? I’m trying to squeeze what efficiency I can out of these cobbled-together engines of yours, and explaining my techniques to your crew is only slowing me down. They’ve gotten slack, working under civilian temporary chiefs for so long.”

  “My engineers know how to do their jobs, Commander.”

  “They know how it used to be done, and if that were adequate, you wouldn’t have called on me. Your Doctor Dax did come up with some effective workarounds for reconciling different species’ technologies, but you’re novices at that compared to the Rigelians.”

  “No doubt you do have the edge on technique, Kivei. But these people all have their own abilities and strengths, which you’ll never discern if you keep doing all their work for them. Perhaps if you let them show you what they can do, it will help you better understand how to utilize them in achieving what you want them to do.”

  To her credit, Tizahr took only a couple of seconds to say, “You’re right, Captain. If I’m to turn this crew into a smoothly functioning machine, I need to know the full specs and tolerances of its components. If I may, sir?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “All right, people, stop everything you’re doing!” Tizahr shouted, clapping her hands over her head. “Time for some emergency drills! Show me what you’ve got!”

  Reed and Paris wisely retreated before the chaos began. “She seems . . . intense,” Caroline said once they were back in the corridor.

  “She’s very driven. She was one of Grennex Aerospace’s top warp engineers by the equivalent age of twenty-two. The Rigelian Trade Commission made her a better offer at twenty-eight, so she became a chief engineer for their defense fleet, which means she got folded into Starfleet when Rigel joined. She’s the best—but the best aren’t always easy to like.”

  “Still, I’m impressed with how you handled her, Malcolm. Captain Shumar would’ve probably butted heads with her and loudly reminded her who was in charge, and I would’ve had to come in later as the good cop and finesse her into cooperating. But you had all the finesse you needed—even though you and Bryce come from similar backgrounds.”

  “All I know about finesse, I learned under Jonathan Archer. He understood that most Starfleet personnel are more scientists than soldiers. I had trouble understanding that for years, but I like to think I’ve gotten the hang of it.”

  “I’d say you have. You mesh well with your crew. And you’ve probably helped Tizahr mesh with them too.”

  He lowered his head. “I’m gratified to hear you say that. When I took this command, I was distant from them at first. I relied on Travis—Mister Mayweather—to be my bridge to them. But we’ve grown close . . . largely through sharing adversity.”

  Paris hesitated a few moments. “Speaking of growing close, Malcolm . . . when are we going to get to the most important part of the tour?”

  “What would that be?”

  She moved in closer—much closer. “Your quarters.”

  Reed flushed, surprised but far from unhappy. “You mean . . . you want to . . .”

  “I want to.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “I mean—not that I don’t want to, of course. But you’ve kept a certain distance . . .”

  “Which h
as nothing to do with you. I just . . .” She sighed. “Can we discuss this in private? In your quarters?”

  At once thrilled and confused, Reed led her there. Once they were alone, Paris paced the small room and gathered her thoughts. “About nine months ago, I led an Essex landing party making the first official Federation contact with the planet Delta IV.”

  Reed’s eyes widened. “The Deltans. I’ve heard the stories about them from Travis—it was his family’s ship that made the original contact.”

  “I know. Small galaxy.”

  “And I heard that there were some . . . difficulties . . . with Essex’s visit. That their sexual proclivities were more potent—more dangerous—than even the spacers’ tales. Like the pheromones of Orion females.” He gazed at her solicitously. “Did they . . . do something to you?”

  “No, nothing like that. The Deltans are a remarkable, open, compassionate people. That’s just the problem. The connections they form with their empathic powers are so deep, so profound . . . It’s easy for a human to get lost in them. The Deltan man I had sex with . . . what he offered was a casual, friendly gesture among his people, and I was—” She laughed. “Well, I was just being a good diplomat and accepting the natives’ hospitality. But . . .” She sobered quickly. “I almost lost my sense of myself as an individual. The other member of my crew who slept with them—with several of them at once—he’s still in a catatonic state. He’s not expected to recover, ever. I got lucky.” She needed a moment before she could continue. “But it was a struggle. It’s taken me months to get past the yearning for more, the depression, the withdrawal. I’ve been afraid to attempt normal human sex . . . though I’m not sure if it’s because I’m afraid of losing myself again or if I’m afraid I’d just find it inadequate next to the memory of . . . that.”