In here it could not attack her. And neither could anyone else.
The door chime sounded, and Melora jumped, the small convulsion of startlement enough to launch her slowly upward. She caught herself on a handhold and sighed. “Yes, who is it?”
After a moment a voder-generated voice came over the intercom. “It’s K’chak’!’op, Lieutenant. I was wondering if I could come in for a moment.”
“Uhh, I’m kind of busy right now. What’s it about?”
“Well, I brought over those new cosmozoan-tracking subroutines I was working on for stellar cartography. I thought you might want to take a look at them before our new guests come aboard. I know you’re still on light duty, but I’m sure you must be bored with it by now.”
Indeed, she was bored out of her skull, but she hesitated. “Couldn’t you have just uploaded those to me?”
“Well…yes…but the truth is, I wanted to see how you were doing. I…well, I feel terrible that I wasn’t able to do more to prevent your injuries, and—”
“All right! All right, just—just a moment.” She pushed off the wall and drifted in a low arc toward the door, catching herself on the modified antigrav sled that rested there, and throwing a resentful glare at it as she did. Dr. Ree had mended her bones as best he could, but he had told her that the regeneration process could only be accelerated so much. An osteostimulator took only minutes to restore a broken bone to sufficient strength to function in the gravity it had evolved for, but getting it strong enough to function in substantially higher gravity took substantially more time. A week after the attack, she was still undergoing daily stimulator treatments along with low- gphysical therapy in sickbay, and was under medical orders to stay off her feet in ship-normal gravity for at least another few days. Taking a cue from Enterprise’s mission to Dokaalan last year, Dr. Ree had had an antigrav cargo sled modified for her as a makeshift hoverchair. She hated the thing. She had always hated having to be seen dependent on a chair, unable to move under her own power. She couldn’t stand to appear helpless. She had thought that over the past dozen years or so she had reached the point where that didn’t bother her so much anymore. But that was before she really had been rendered helpless. Before she had been smashed to the deck, flopping uselessly like a dying fish, unable to prevent Tuvok from wrenching control of her mind and body away from her and forcing her to give up secrets she was sworn to protect.
She didn’t hate Tuvok for what he had done. She couldn’t blame him, any more than she could blame sensitive little Orilly for helping him. But she hated herself for the shudder of panic that went through her every time she was reminded of the assault, of the violation—of her true and inescapable helplessness.
Taking deep breaths, Melora gathered herself, and hit the door panel. Despite herself, she couldn’t help pulling back a bit at the sight of the massive Pak’shree looming in her doorframe, tentacles writhing, mouthparts gnashing. “Ahh, there you are! Mind if I—whoa!” K’chak’!’op made a move to come in, but reared back as her forward segments crossed the threshold into the centigravity field.
Melora realized she’d retreated behind the antigrav sled, and cursed herself for it. Nonetheless, she said, “Maybe it’d be better if we talked like this.”
“Oh, yes. I’d be helpless in there. I wouldn’t want to smash into you by accident.”
“Uhh, look, you said you had those subroutines for me?” A fringe effect from the corridor’s gravity was pulling her gently toward the door, she realized. She caught herself on the sled, again resenting the need to depend on it.
“Ahh, yes.” A tentacle reached back and retrieved a padd from the utility pouch she wore attached to the back of her carapace. An exoskeletal being, she wore no clothes, instead having her forward body segment painted in sciences blue. “But I also wanted to make sure you were feeling all right, and ask if there was anything I could do for you. I’ve been meaning to see you ever since the accident, but you’re so hard to find. When you’re not in sickbay you’re always cooped up here in your quarters.”
“Is that so bad?” Melora challenged. “It seems to work pretty well for you.”
“Well, I thought so before, but it does get rather lonely. Just me and my fears.”
Melora stared. “Fears? You mean like claustrophobia?” When K’chak’!’ op had finally emerged from her seclusion a couple of weeks ago, she had explained to Melora how cramped the ship made her feel.
“Well, that was part of it, but it wasn’t my real fear. Mainly I was afraid of hurting someone. You little endoskeletals, you’re just so fragile.”
Melora snatched the padd from her tentacles. “I’m not fragile!”
“Oh, no more fragile than any other endoskeletal. It’s all relative of course. Why, if Vale or Troi or, Goddesses forbid, dear Captain Riker or Mr. Tuvok were to fall down in my planet’s gravity, they’d shatter too. It’s simply a matter of physics.”
“Okay, I get what you’re trying to do, Chaka. But I’m not afraid. I’m just giving myself—giving my body time to heal in its natural environment.”
“Nonsense. You’re trying to cut yourself off from other people again, deal with your problems in seclusion, just like you always do.”
Melora gaped. “What brought that on? What happened to Miss Nice and Considerate?”
“I don’t mother grown females, Melora. You’re strong enough to take the truth. Or you should be. Maybe it will take a little time for you to rebuild that strength, but I know you have it in you. So I intend to help you build it up again. Why don’t we start by going to the mess hall for a bite to eat?”
Melora threw a look at the sled. “I’d really rather not.”
“Why? Because you don’t like being dependent on a machine? Look at me. Listen to me. We couldn’t even communicate without this machine I’m wearing. And we couldn’t breathe without the machine we’re standing in. Or floating in, as the case may be.”
Melora realized that the big crustacean wasn’t going to let her off the hook. But she admitted to herself that Chaka had a point. “All right. Let’s go to the mess, talk over these subroutines.” She began clambering into the sled. “But why are you taking such an interest in me, anyway?”
“Oh…just passing a favor forward.”
“So—how are our guests settling in?”
Christine Vale chewed on a forkful of eggs while she formulated her response to the captain’s question. Riker had invited her to breakfast (which he cooked himself), since Troi had an early appointment with the Pa’haquel delegation. The group consisted of a few dozen clan and crew members, mostly from Qui’hibra’s fleet-clan, which would serve as a skeleton crew for the attempt to coexist with a star-jelly, if an agreement was reached. (A live star-jelly, that is; she found herself and others starting to fall into the habit of using “star-jelly” for the live beasts and “skymount” for the reanimated dead ones.) This morning, Qui’hibra had summoned Troi to discuss—or rather, argue about—the fine details of the negotiations they were preparing to attempt with the jellies. Riker hadn’t been happy about the scheduling, but the Pa’haquel were impatient, and he and Troi both wished to avoid alienating them when their relationship was tenuous enough already.
“It’s a mixed bag,” she finally said. “The Vomnin envoys are friendly enough; I think they’re mainly curious about our technology. A lot of theirs is just as good, but they seem eager to learn for its own sake.”
“Good.”
“And the Rianconi, well, they’re just eager to please. Enough said there.” Certainly the scantily clad humanoids had drawn considerable attention from the crew when they had come aboard, and had done nothing to discourage it. One of the males, observing that Vale seemed tense, had even offered to provide for her needs on an overnight basis. She had politely declined. Not that she had any great problem letting a man wait on her hand and foot (and in between), if he freely chose such service and saw dignity in it; she’d done as much on Risa and Argelius in her day. But when she did so, she preferred the man to be less dainty and fragile than these Rianconi were, so that she didn’t feel she was taking advantage. Well, and for other, more shallow reasons. Besides, a lot of her tension involved her uncertainty about Jaza, and taking another male to bed when she would rather be with him hadn’t struck her as the best way to relieve it.