What Is Love?

by Cyberwraith9

Summary:

An unexpected confession turns Mariner's life upside-down. What did Boimler mean when he said "I love you?" And how do the words make her feel? She might not know, but everybody else seems to!

Notes:

Chronologically set vaguely after Season Four, but Tendi is around, because obviously Tendi is coming back, and everything's better with more Tendi.

For the record, I don't think the show should cater to any shipping. But I'm a sucker for "best friends falling in love," so I wrote it anyway. Hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1: The Nautilus

Summary:

A routine maintenance call turns into a deadly race to save an entire passenger liner from annihilation!

Captain’s Log, Supplemental: While installing a routine upgrade package to the subsurface canal systems on Pacifica, the Cerritos received a request for technical assistance from the independent vessel Nautilus in the neighboring Aldonta system. Apparently, the Nautilus is a decommissioned Federation starship, privately purchased and refitted as a luxury vessel, of all things. Her captain reported ongoing fluctuations in the warp core and requested an engineering consultation.

Since the work on the canal system requires the majority of the Cerritos’s resources, I’ve dispatched a team in a shuttlecraft, commanded by Lieutenant Mariner, to rendezvous with the Nautilus and provide assistance. I expect the issue is a minor lapse in maintenance that would be easily resolved, yet I somehow suspect that the team will encounter “unexpected complications” that will require them to extend their mission. 

Well, the crew has been working hard this past week to refit Pacifica’s canals. If Mariner decides to dawdle for a few hours on a glorified cruise ship, she’s earned a little slack. Just so long as she doesn't tear the place apart...

 

---

 

Sparks erupted from the upper engineering balcony, raining fire on the deck below. The burning flecks of metal and plasteel traced glowing lines through a thick, choking haze of smoke. Overhead, the lighting fixtures whined, their glow intensifying, singing in cruel harmony with the stuttering pulse of the archaic warp core that thrummed at the center of the room.

Becket Mariner paused long enough to run her bare forearm across her face, mopping the sweat as best she could, before her hands plunged back to her console. The air was already ten degrees warmer than it had been when she and her team first beamed aboard, and it was growing hotter by the moment.

On any other day, Mariner would have been delighted to tour an old Miranda-class cruiser-turned-pleasure-barge. The stalwart design, with a saucer-shaped primary hull and underslung nacelles not unlike a California-class, had been a mainstay of Starfleet for almost a century. Famous ships like the Majestic, the Reliant, and the Saratoga had borne crews through the endless void in the search for new life and new civilizations. And there was still enough of a Starfleet geek left inside her that would thrill at touring the old ship.

The fact that this refitted version of a Miranda-class now also boasted luxuries like a cocktail lounge and a casino might also have enticed her. 

But fate had other plans in store for the Nautilus and its visiting Starfleet officers. So Mariner took it upon herself to once more jam her thumb into the eye of fate and deny it the disaster it craved.

As the whine of the warp core pitched higher, Mariner gritted her teeth and buried her gaze in the console’s readout. She had purposely picked a console facing away from the warp core, refusing to let its flashing light and rattling injectors get under her skin. The warp core could complain all it wanted to, but she wasn’t about to let it explode on her watch. “This thing’s kicking out some insane power levels. Somebody, tell me something!” she yelled above the din.

Behind her, D’vana Tendi stood at the warp core’s base, diagnosing the equipment directly with her tricorder. Her green skin ran slick with sweat, her hair matted to her forehead as she scanned for answers. “The core’s regulators are way past due for replacement. The matter-antimatter flow is out of control, and the reaction chamber is close to overflowing! We are minutes away from a breach, maybe less!”

To Mariner’s left stood Grobar, the captain of the Nautilus, who clutched his hands together pleadingly. The flop sweat pouring down his face had little to do with the sweltering heat in the engine room, and everything to do with his livelihood about to explode in his face. “Please, you have to do something!” he wailed.

Mariner spared the squat, heavyset Bolian an irritated glance. “Yeah, no shit,” she snapped at him. Then, to her team, she called, “Reboot the regulators?”

Across engineering, at an alcove of her own, a calm voice rose over the noise to answer. “I have already attempted to do so,” called T'Lyn. The unflappable woman handled her console as though she were working on just another routine duty, quick but unhurried. To Mariner’s annoyance, T'Lyn had not even begun to sweat, and her bob of dark hair hung flawlessly behind her pointed ears. She looked as calm and collected as she did nearly any other day that Mariner had known the provisional officer.

This kind of heat probably reminds her of home. Just one more perk of being a Vulcan, Mariner thought of T'Lyn’s composure, hardly bitter. Out loud, she said, “Cycle the antimatter pods’ emergency valve!”

“Too late,” said Tendi. “If we close that emergency valve now, with the current rate of the flow, it’ll overwhelm the valve, breach the pods, and we all explode anyway.”

“The wisest course of action would be to abandon ship,” T'Lyn noted.

The mere suggestion made Grobar puff and gasp, as though he might overload and explode himself. “I am not abandoning the Nautilus! This ship is my life! It’s the jewel of the sector! And…” Deflating, he added, “And our escape pods aren’t exactly…launch-ready, you might say. Money was tight at the beginning, but I had planned to invest the profits from this maiden voyage into—”

“We get it. The ship sucks,” Mariner snapped at him. Then, to the rest of her team, she yelled, “Can we just eject the damn core? Make it clear of the explosion on impulse power?”

At Mariner’s right, Bradward Boimler shook his head. He pounded the keys of the console next to hers, and exclaimed, “The ejection system isn’t responding. It’s like it isn’t even there!”

Grobar mopped uselessly at his embarrassed blue features as he explained, “That’s because it, er, isn’t. When I had the ship refit, I was told that the ejection system was almost never used, and could be resold after-market to add value back—”

“Almost never used because you only need them when the CORE is about to EXPLODE!” Boimler shrieked at Grobar. 

The Bolian at least had the good graces to look ashamed. “The Ferengi who refit this vessel made a very competitive offer, and—”

“Ferengi. Great. That explains everything,” Boimler huffed.

Straightening, Grobar snapped, “Our situation is no excuse for speciesism, young man!”

“He’s right,” Mariner added, smirking. “Be better, dude.”

“It’s not speciesism, it’s part of their culture,” Boimler squealed indignantly. “They literally codified it! There are multiple Rules of Acquisition specifically about lying to customers. I just can’t remember which ones they are right now because we’re about to explode!”

“The Nautilus is more than a luxury liner,” Grobar insisted officiously. “It is a safe harbor for any and all who want to experience the majesty of space while enjoying the finest luxuries in the quadrant!” 

He recited the lines with rote precision. Mariner suspected that Grobar had put more effort into the sales pitch than he had into any other part of his vessel.

“Yeah, well, your safe harbor is about to become an expanding cloud of gas because you went with the lowest bidder,” Boimler shot back.

Mariner couldn’t help but grin. At first glance, Bradward Boimler would be the last person anyone might call upon in a time of crisis. Gangly limbs, shoulders like a trout. A pallid face forever pinched into an expression of discomfort and framed by a ridiculous coif of purple hair. Overthought every decision, no matter how small. Over-scheduling and overworking were his vices, and the slightest obstacle could send him into a tailspin of self-doubt.

But brave to a fault, and bold when it counted. Brilliant and loyal. Mariner trusted Boimler with her life. She knew he wouldn’t let her down.

Plus, it was fun to watch him get sassy, even though she would never admit it.

Boimler’s tone grew serious again, chasing Mariner out of her reverie. “We’ve got another problem: the runaway power is starting to overload the ship’s systems.”

Another console on the level above burst into a hail of sparks and debris, chasing Tendi back from the warp core. “We kinda noticed!” she retorted.

“No, I mean all of the ship’s systems, everywhere,” Boimler clarified, his voice rising with alarm. “Even if we manage to shut the core down, if we don’t do it quickly enough, the system failures will cascade and destroy the Nautilus!”

The overhead lights continued to brighten as if to illustrate his point. An audible whine surrounded them, rising above even the thrum of the warp core, as power relays hidden in the walls and ceilings began to hit their limit. If one wrong relay burst, it would cause its neighbor to explode, starting a domino chain of plasma conduit breaches that would tear apart the ship.

Mariner knew when she was out of her engineering depth. She slapped her combadge. “Mariner to Kings Canyon. Ruthie, we need a consultation.”

On the nearby shuttlecraft Kings Canyon, Samanthan Rutherford maintained overwatch on their operation. Hindsight made Mariner curse herself for leaving him aboard the shuttle while the rest of them beamed over. His engineering acumen rivaled all of theirs combined. But he had drawn the proverbial short straw when they’d arrived, getting stuck as the shuttle’s babysitter while Mariner and the others diagnosed what was supposed to be a minor core fluctuation on a party ship. 

Rutherford transmitted back through thick static, “What is going on over there? I’m reading crazy power fluctuations! It’s almost like someone just opened the floodgates in the warp core!”

“That’s more or less what’s happening,” Mariner grunted, and flinched as a jet of sparks erupted from the console at her left. Grobar yelped and retreated to a spot on the deck as far away from any console as possible.

Rutherford didn’t even need a second. “Reboot the regulators!” he transmitted.

“Tried it,” Mariner said.

“Emergency shut—”

“Okay,” Mariner interrupted him, forcibly shoving an upbeat tone into her voice. Losing her cool at her friends wouldn’t help the situation, and neither would inciting more panic from their craven privateer host. “Assume that we’ve already tried the first five or six things you can think of. What else’ve you got for me?”

This time, Rutherford was slower to answer. Mariner could practically hear the engineer hunched over the shuttle’s controls in thought, his dark eyebrows furrowed in concentration while he pondered a solution. Finally, he answered, “Cycle the antimatter pods’ emergency valve—” he transmitted.

“We can’t!” Boimler exclaimed.

“—at minimum power,” finished Rutherford.

Boimler blinked. “Oh.”

Tendi brightened, lifting onto her toes with excitement. “I get it! If we stem the flow gradually, the power output will decrease, but the valve won’t be breached. It’s just like when we run diagnostics on an emergency bulkhead. We reduce the actuator power to minimum, which makes the door move super-slowly, so we can spot any failure points during the cycle. Cycling a bulkhead at minimum power is one of my favorite things to do!”

“Mine too!” Rutherford transmitted cheerfully.

Mariner would have found the pair adorable if she weren’t standing five meters from a runaway warp core. With a second thought, she decided that no, actually, they were still adorable, even in the face of impending doom. “So we pinch the antimatter flow slowly, the core fills up with harmless deuterium, and the day is saved?” she confirmed.

“Will that damage the core?” Grobar interjected nervously, and was roundly ignored.

“This will not solve the cascading overload issue,” T'Lyn cautioned.

A moment of silence hung over them, punctuated by another console bursting into phosphorescent fireworks at the far end of engineering. Then Boimler lifted his chin with an expression of dawning realization. He fixed Grobar with a hard look, the kind Mariner imagined him practicing in his mirror when no one else was around: the Commander Look. “How many people are on the ship, and where are they now?”

Grobar stammered, “We have about two hundred passengers. When the problem got bad, I ordered everyone back to their accommodations on decks eight through ten.

Two hundred suckers packed into three decks? “Accommodations” must be a little smaller than the average closet, thought Mariner.

“What about crew?” pressed Boimler.

“Everything is automated,” Grobar said. “There are a few attendant holograms in the lounge areas, but otherwise… Well, it saves on overhead,” he explained sheepishly.

“Hey, alright! The one time in the universe when cheaping out on labor might actually save lives!” said Tendi, chagrinned.

But her false cheer evaporated when Boimler announced, “Let’s blow up the ship.”

“What?” screeched Grobar.

“What?” exclaimed Mariner.

Boimler grinned. “Let’s blow it up ‘slowly,’ like Rutherford’s and Tendi’s bulkhead. We channel the excess energy into specific unnecessary systems and subsystems, and let them overload. Control when and where the overload happens, so we avoid one system cascading to the next.”

“A brutally effective solution,” T'Lyn noted. “Assuming we succeed, the ship will be rendered inoperable, but relatively intact.”

“But my ship!” wailed Grobar. Again, he went unheard.

“Everybody,” Mariner commanded, “grab a console and start pulling systems. Auxiliary power and life support on decks eight through ten are must-saves. Anything that might blow the whole ship, like antimatter containment, is obviously a no-no. But everything else is fair game.”

Tendi jumped to a console next to T'Lyn’s, and the pair began to type and swipe furiously. “I’ll start the valve cycle. At minimal power, it’s going to take several minutes to safely shut. And ‘safely’ is really stretching the word,” said Tendi.

Mariner’s hands flew over her own console controls, bringing up list after list of systems and subsystems to run through a hastily-coded command line. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Boimler doing the same on his console. More than that, he had already coded a subroutine for any console in engineering to exclude system requests for power rerouting on any subsystem already displayed on a different console, thus ensuring that the four of them wouldn’t waste time trying to access the same system simultaneously and getting in each other’s way. Leave it to Boimler to maximize their destructive efficiency with something so mundane.

“You get all of that, Rutherford?” Mariner shouted down at her combadge.

“Yeah,” Rutherford transmitted, “but there’s a third problem. The core meltdown is throwing out a lot of radiation. Also, I didn’t hear you say you were prioritizing life support in engineering, so…”

The heat in the room had noticeably worsened. Her skin wasn’t glowing yet, but Mariner could feel the equivalent of a bad sunburn prickling underneath her uniform. “Get a transporter lock on us,” she said. “You can pull us out as soon as we’re done.”

“I’m working to establish a lock, but the core emissions are making it tricky. It’s going to take a long time to lock onto all five of you.”

Already, Mariner could hear distant thumps and rumblings as relays all over the ship began to overload. She watched as systems on her board turned red, indicating that they were already gone, and redirected power into the next available systems as quickly as the color changed. “Grobar, get to the passenger decks. You’ll be safe there.”

“Umm,” Tendi said hesitantly from the other alcove, “I really wish you’d said that before I blew the relays in the turbolift controls.”

“I cannot recommend transit through a Jeffries tube at the moment either,” T'Lyn added. “Multiple ruptured EPS conduits have created unsafe conditions throughout the ship.”

Mariner gritted her teeth. It’s never just one meteor, she thought. It’s always a fucking meteor shower. Looking down, she shouted at her combadge, “Rutherford, is the transporter lock faster if you focus on one person at a time?”

“Affirmative! I think…”

She ran some quick, dirty mental math, and then said, “New plan: lock on and pull us out one at a time. The nanosecond you have one transport complete, start locking onto the next person.”

“This is unacceptable!” Grobar shrieked. “I demand that you come up with a new plan that doesn’t destroy my ship!”

“Start with our Captain of the Year over here,” Mariner added at her chest.

“Okie-dokie!” Rutherford transmitted.

Mariner growled as she sent a rush of power into the thruster assemblies and watched as, one by one, they vanished from her board. “How come we can hear him okie-dokie, but we can’t transport to he-who-okie-dokies?” she snarled.

T'Lyn answered from her station, “A subspace short-wave transmission is less complex than a transporter pattern by a factor of—“

“It was rhetorical, T'Lyn!” Mariner snapped.

The deck plating bucked underneath them as a thunderclap rumbled from the aft end of the vessel. An entire section of engineering’s upper level buckled, then collapsed, crumpling into the far end of engineering in a cacophony of shrieking metal. In the blink of an eye, fully half of engineering, the beating heart of the ship, had become a gnarl of jagged edges and shards. It was only blind, stupid luck that none of the collapsed debris had breached the casing of the warp core.

Uncoiling from his reflexive flinch, Boimler said, “That’s the port impulse engine gone. Wasn’t expecting it to be that loud…”

“Boims, it’s a giant fusion reactor,” Mariner deadpanned.

“It’s MY giant fusion reactor!” Grobar howled.

“Lock established,” Rutherford announced. “Energizing.”

The Bolian captain vanished as the Kings Canyon’s shimmering transporter beam disassembled him at the molecular level. Immediately, Mariner felt a huge weight lifted off her shoulders. Nothing made doing her job more difficult than a pissed-off captain screaming in her ear. It was a nuisance she knew all too well.

“Emergency valve cycle at twenty-five percent,” Tendi reported.

“T'Lyn is next, Rutherford,” Mariner said. 

With hindsight on her hindsight, she now realized that leaving Rutherford on the shuttle had been an accidental stroke of genius. Any one of them could operate the transporter with basic efficacy, but with surging energy and unchecked radiation flooding the compartment, an engineer like Rutherford would have the deftest touch on the controls to transport them out of harm’s way, which might mean the difference between saving some of them or all of them. 

Look at me, she thought sardonically, recontextualizing my fuck-ups as successes. I’m sounding more like a captain by the minute.

Another thunderclap rocked the ship as the starboard impulse engine overloaded. For a moment, they all flinched, waiting to see if the engineering level above them would collapse, as it had on the other side of the room. When the ceiling stayed where it was, they collectively returned to their consoles, picking and choosing which systems to overload next. 

Mariner had to admit, she felt a perverse sort of pleasure in blowing up a ship piecemeal. As she rerouted power to the Delectable Edibles—the fancy name Grobar had assigned to the ship’s mess hall—she imagined a surge of power running through the replicators, creating a shower of random foods in the brief seconds before the relays overloaded to create flaming food geysers that painted the opposite bulkhead. 

In reality, the whole room likely just became a cascade of debris and sparks. But what fun was that? It was Mariner’s imagination, and she preferred to enjoy the little pleasures of her job, especially when they weren’t real.

“Rutherford, are you working the transporter, or fucking building a new one over there?” Mariner shouted.

“Almost got it!” Rutherford transmitted. “The more systems explode, the more interference it creates. It’s going to take longer with each subsequent trip.”

“I still have available systems on my list,” T'Lyn said.

“Send them over to me,” Mariner ordered.

A few taps of the console, and T'Lyn nodded. “Done.”

“Energizing,” Rutherford said, and T'Lyn vanished into the transporter beam.

The few remaining systems from T'Lyn’s list joined those on Mariner’s. Even with the additional lines, her list was growing vanishingly small. She performed another quick mental calculation, and then added another set of systems to her list, ones to be saved for the absolute last resort if she needed them. “Tendi, you’re next,” Mariner announced, raising her voice above the rumble and crash of the collapsing ship.

“I can stay and help,” Tendi protested, hunching deeper over her console, as though she could duck under the unwanted transporter beam. “It’ll go faster with the three of us.”

“T, we’re running out of ship,” Mariner insisted. “Consolidating lists will be just as fast and risk fewer lives.”

Far outside of engineering, a sound like a detonating bomb rolled through the ship, the sheer force of it rippling through them. The subsequent shockwave bucked the deck itself, tossing all three of them off their feet. Mariner felt her head collide with the upper screen of her console and heard a vicious crunch before a burst of stars blinded her. 

Somewhere in the distance, she heard Rutherford’s voice exclaim scratchily, “Holy Toledo! The starboard nacelle just exploded! It went up like a, like a… What were those big, long balloon sky boats filled with hydrogen? A zeppelin! The whole ship is spinning!”

Mariner groped blindly for her console, grasping the edge of it to haul herself off the deck plating. Something warm and wet trickled down past her eyes and around her nose. When she licked her lips, she tasted blood. Her vision slowly came back to her, the console in front of her lurching drunkenly from side to side. Whether that was because she was concussed, or because the ship’s attitude control was shot to hell, neither option was good.

“Rutherford!” Mariner barked. “Tendi!”

“Right, right, I’m on it!” Rutherford insisted.

At one edge of her blurry vision, she saw Tendi scrambling back upright to resume their systematic destruction of the Nautilus. A cut on her cheek poured green blood down her face, mixing with the thick sheen of sweat that drenched her. “Just blew the lido deck. Too bad, because I could really go for a dip in a pool right now,” she joked.

“Ditto the casino,” Boimler added. “Latinum’s probably exploding out of every slot machine and virtual Tongo game up there.”

“That means everyone’s a winner!” Tendi said. Her eyes flicked back to her readout. “Valve cycle at sixty percent.”

“Lock established!” Rutherford transmitted.

“Send me your list,” Mariner said. 

A look of rebellion flashed in Tendi’s features, and for a moment, Mariner worried she might actually argue. Of her entire team, Tendi was the only one Mariner wasn’t completely certain that she could physically overpower if one of those dummies decided to get heroic.

But then another rumble gripped the deck, shaking the three of them up through their boots. Through the smoke and the sparks, Mariner gave her friend a pleading look. 

Tendi’s face softened. She tapped her console, and the remainder of her list appeared on Mariner’s screens. With it came the cycle report of the antimatter valve, which crawled past sixty-three percent. “There’s some good ones in there. I saved the bridge for you guys,” Tendi said.

Then she vanished in a shimmer of light.

“Boimler’s next,” Mariner shouted at her combadge. 

“No.” Boimler slapped his own combadge to patch into the channel. “Mariner’s injured. She needs evac.”

“For a bump on the head?” Mariner scoffed. “Fuck off. Boimler’s next, Rutherford.” She attacked her console with renewed vigor, pumping excess power into the few remaining systems that Tendi had sent to her board. 

“Your forehead’s split open. You’re probably concussed. If I leave and you pass out, that’s it for everyone onboard, including you,” insisted Boimler. “Besides, next to Rutherford, I have the highest engineering rating here.”

“Ha!” Mariner laughed. “First: Tendi and T'Lyn would engineer circles around you. Second: it’s rerouting power. That’s first-day Academy shit. A blindfolded Mugato could do it.”

She selected and rerouted to her next set of systems by way of demonstration. As Tendi had promised, the bridge relays were at the top. It felt indescribably satisfying to blow up a bridge. Some dark corner of Mariner had always wanted to do it, but had never been given the chance. She imagined it happening: consoles erupting, panels mushrooming outward and then bursting with plumes of fire, and the captain’s chair at the center of it all, the last to go before the relays in the command console made the throne-like seat pop like a firecracker before the overhead dome gave way, ejecting the whole mess into cold space.

She wasn’t eager for it, but if she had to die that day, she could die happy.

“You think I’m an idiot?” 

Boimler’s accusatory tone dragged her out of her imaginings. How long had she been staring off into space? “What are you talking about?” she insisted, and began rerouting overloads into the upper three decks’ gravity plating, turning their floors into detonating landmines.

“I can see the bottom of your board. You’ve got engineering control marked for overload. That’s here, Mariner!” he snapped.

Guiltily, Mariner let her eye flicker down to the last item on her list, the one she had earmarked for her worst-case scenario. “If the core stops before we need to—”

“It won’t,” Boimler interrupted. “I can do math too. The fewer ship systems we have, the less available ship there is for power to flow to. That means even at minimal runaway output, we still overload. If we time this right, we can trigger the engineering relays just as the valve closes, and avoid a warp core breach. But that still means blowing up our own consoles.”

Somehow it was worse that he wouldn’t look at her as he said it. His eyes remained fixed on his console, watching the power burst through one relay after the next, carefully milking every second he could out of nonessential systems before they vanished in a blast of plasma and winked out on his board.

“Yes, congratulations!” Mariner snapped, keeping her own focus on her work. “You get an A-plus for figuring out what we have to do. Rutherford, lock onto Boimler and beam him the hell out of here!”

“I’m not—” Boimler started to protest.

Mariner whirled on him, fixing him with her deadliest glare. “No. Shut up. Then get ready to send me whatever relays you have left. Then, keep shutting up!”

“But—”

She hated herself for doing it. She looked at Boimler, and saw the same pain, the same despair, that she felt. If it had been Mariner watching any of them tell her to leave them behind, she would have raised hell itself to stop them. So she played dirty, and used the one thing she knew Boimler couldn’t overcome:

“That’s an order, Lieutenant!” Mariner bellowed.

Boimler choked. Bradward Boimler was Starfleet’s patron saint of following the rules. He worshiped the regulations like they had been handed down from on high. It felt like cheating to use his own love of the chain of command against him. But Mariner didn’t care, so long as he made it out alive.

Another detonation pitched the deck beneath them, throwing both of them to the floor. Mariner felt the metal grating slam into her elbow, and her whole arm went numb. She gasped in pain, and then coughed. The smoke had thickened into a dark miasma. Every breath hung inside of her like hot coals, and her eyes watered.

“Uh, guys? That was the starboard nacelle doing a zeppelin!” Rutherford transmitted. “Can we make a decision here?”

Somehow, Boimler got to his feet first, which pissed off Mariner to no end. She would have knocked him down out of spite, but her head was swimming, and she was having trouble moving. Her forehead throbbed for some reason that she couldn’t remember. Why was her face wet? And why did she taste blood?

Boimler grabbed her by the shoulders and helped her to her feet, where she swayed. Her working hand clamped onto her console to steady her until she could lean her hip against it. The other arm still hung numbly at her side, tingling, unresponsive.

“Okay,” said Boimler. “You win. Rutherford, lock on and beam me out.”

“Finally! Locking on. This is going to take a minute…” Rutherford answered, sounding relieved.

Mariner flashed a grin through the pain as she looked back to her console.  Through the smoky haze, she saw systems still waiting to be exploded, and remembered what they were doing. Engineering consoles last! she reminded her shaky fingers. 

Next to her, Boimler worked his own console with the same fervent speed and, annoyingly, with two functioning hands. But he seemed pensive, and it took Mariner an extra second to remember why. Bad enough he had to leave her to blow herself up, but he would probably also be the one to tell her mother how she died. That thought alone made Mariner wonder if she were the luckier one, going down with the Nautilus in a blaze of glory. 

“Hey,” she said, and nudged his boot with hers. “I know you only want to go last so nobody can see you pretending to be Kirk on the Reliant.”

That got a snort out of Boimler. “Don’t be stupid. Kirk was never on the Reliant. He and Khan never met in person after the Botany Bay incident.”

“Yeah, but imagine if he did,” Mariner insisted. The flight of fancy helped her ignore how bright the lights overhead were, or how much it burned when she breathed. “Kirk storms the Reliant, hunting deck by deck for the Genesis Device. He finds it in engineering, but Khan is there to stop him with his big, rippling, muscly, sweaty chest.”

“Wait, was the Genesis Device in engineering?” Boimler said.

“Doesn’t matter. So, Khan and Kirk, they get into a big tussle, right? They’re punching, and kicking, and wrestling around. And they wind up in the dilithium chamber. Remember how big the old ones were, with the transparent aluminum walls? And they’re struggling, pushing, and Khan forces Kirk to his knees, staring down at him with those piercing eyes. Something snaps in them both. And that’s when the chamber starts getting steamy. Bam! Hands slap the foggy glass as hatred turns into something beautiful.”

Boimler laughed, then coughed, then laughed again. “Do you have a weird fetish for all genetic supermen, or is it just the one?”

“Hey, I’m not about to hop on the Fascist Eugenicist train or anything, but have you seen his chest? You could park a shuttlecraft between those pecs!” Mariner said. “Call it one good hate-fuck, and then I drop his ass back on Ceti Alpha Five.”

The skin on Boimler’s hand had turned ruby red, blazing in the too-bright light. “Since we’re being actively irradiated right now, I can promise you that neither Kirk nor Khan would have their ‘dalliance’ in the dilithium chamber. They’d probably find a nice set of empty quarters nearby. Something with a bed, maybe some candles…”

“God, even your fantasies are boring!” laughed Mariner. 

The embarrassed smile he offered in reply lit a warm glow in her chest, making what happened next that much easier, and that much harder.

“Got a lock,” Rutherford transmitted.

“Send me your board,” Mariner told Boimler. To her relief, he tapped the command into the console without argument, sending his dwindling list to her board. Her next purposeful overload was building in the cargo bays, giving her a few seconds to look up and meet his gaze. She recognized the paper-thin brave expression he wore, and knew how much fear and despair he was swallowing for her benefit. “I’ll see you over there,” she told him, and forced a smile.

“Right. See you over there,” Boimler said. “Rutherford? Energize.”

Mariner watched Boimler vanishing behind a transporter beam, and felt a brief flash of relief. Then she realized that the rest of the smoky wreck of engineering was vanishing as well, and she felt her whole body tingling as her molecules were carefully disassembled. “Wait, not me!” she cried, and grabbed for Boimler’s hand. Her dissipating fingers passed through his. “Ruther—!”

In a heartbeat, the crumbling, smog-choked engineering deck of the Nautilus transitioned into the clean and quiet gray bulkheads of the Kings Canyon. Rutherford sat at the rear console, staring in confusion at Mariner’s arrival. Beyond him, Tendi and T'Lyn manned the shuttle’s cockpit. A dermal regenerator hummed as T'Lyn ran it over Tendi’s sooty cheek. They all paused in surprise as Mariner finished beaming into the compartment.

Through the forward viewport, she could see what remained of the Nautilus. The ship twirled in space, its thrusters dead, its position now at the mercy of each new explosion that rocked it. True to Rutherford’s word, both nacelles were gone, leaving twin trails of gas and debris from the smoking, jagged struts where they’d been. Hull plates peeled off in fiery waves, revealing the skeletal frame of the ship underneath, its exterior compartments venting fine furniture and tasteful decor into the vacuum of space. Mercifully, the middle decks still seemed intact, just as they’d planned.

“—ford!” Mariner bellowed as the beam faded. “What the fuck! Is your transporter beam cross-eyed?”

Rutherford checked and rechecked his console in a nervous flurry. “I don’t understand!” he protested. “I locked onto Boimler’s com…badge…”

His eyes lingered on Mariner’s uniform, and she followed his gaze down to her shoulder. There, adhered to her sleeve, was a second combadge. At some point, Boimler had removed his from his uniform and surreptitiously attached it to hers without Mariner noticing.

She felt the blood drain from her face as she ripped the extra badge off her arm and flung it against the bulkhead. “Get me back over there,” Mariner demanded. Without the smoke, her head was beginning to clear again, and adrenaline turned her blood into lightning. She had a job to finish on the Nautilus, and now that job also included saving Boimler’s ass.

“You want to beam back into that?” Rutherford exclaimed. “I could barely get anyone out!”

At the back of the compartment, Grobar rose from the passenger bench to stomp and rage at the new arrival. “Look what you’ve done to her! I will never financially recover from this!” he sobbed.

Tendi abandoned the copilot chair with her cheek half-healed. “Lock on to his life signs!” she insisted, crowding at Rutherford to look over his shoulder.

“I’m trying!” Rutherford insisted, his fingers dancing across the LCARS display. “With every second that passes, I have to filter through more explosions and radiation to find him! I was using the combages to make it easier, but now…”

T'Lyn spoke up from her seat at the pilot’s station. “The Nautilus’s automated distress beacon has altered its broadcast,” she reported. “Routing to speakers now.”

A blast of static filled the compartment, making them wince collectively. When the static quelled, the sounds of chaos filled its place: fires crackling, relays bursting like champagne corks, with the hiss of fountaining sparks, and the rumble of deck plating being warped and torn.

Through the cacophony, Boimler’s voice faded into the channel. “—not sure if this is working,” he coughed, “but it was worth a try. I just blew the last receiver, so I can only transmit through the emergency channel. The valve cycle is still running, now at ninety-two percent. I should have just enough remaining relays to get me across the finish line. It’s going to work.”

The words punched Tendi in the stomach. She paled, and bent lower, pressing her face next to Rutherford’s and jabbing her finger at the screen. “You have to compensate for—”

“I know, I know,” Rutherford agreed, typing faster, “but—”

Mariner bowled them both clear of the console and threw herself into Rutherford’s chair. The numbness in her arm had faded, replaced by a screaming, shooting pain, but she ignored it, and set her hands to the controls. “Boimler, you little weasel!” she hissed. “I am going to save you just so I can kill you myself!”

Boimler, unable to receive any transmissions from the shuttle, continued to report from the Nautilus. “Down to my last three relays. Just the jazz lounge, the aquarium, and…engineering. I feel bad for the fish.”

“Not the fish…” Grobar moaned, sinking back onto the bench.

With the reactor power dwindling, it should have been easier for Mariner to pierce the noise and lock on to the lone human life sign in Nautilus’s engineering section. But the blown relays were only part of the power system, the part that exploded. Hundreds, thousands, of tiny capacitors in systems and subsystems along the way were still filling and dumping their charges into broken connections all over the ship, creating the effect of a never-ending fireworks show that baffled the transporter’s sensors. Worse, the engineering compartment had completely flooded with radiation. Even as the reactor powered down, the radioactivity would remain in that room for a hundred years unless the compartment was scrubbed and sanitized. Mariner’s skin throbbed with radiation burns from her own exposure, and she could see on her screen how much worse it had become.

“Ninety-six percent complete,” Boimler transmitted. “Man, Tendi, you were right about the pool. It is really getting hot in here. You…”

“Oh, give it a rest, already!” Mariner snarled as his voice faltered. “No one is buying your ‘quippy hero’ schtick, Boimler!”

“Tendi,” Boimler said, and his tone lost any trace of false bravado. “You are the sweetest person I have ever met. Please don’t ever lose that piece of yourself.”

The words landed like a torpedo in the compartment. Tears welled in Tendi’s eyes, and she clapped her hands over her mouth, collapsing against the bulkhead and sinking to the floor.

“There goes the jazz lounge,” Boimler reported, regaining the stiffness of duty in his voice for only a moment. Then, more softly, he said, “Rutherford, you were…you are my brother. And the best roommate I’ve ever had. Keep Twaining for me, alright?”

Even if Boimler could have heard him, Rutherford couldn’t answer. His voice was a croak as he stared helplessly at the transporter controls.

“Ninety-eight percent complete,” coughed Boimler. Even with filters and with computer augmentation cleaning up the signal, his voice on the comms barely rose above the throes of the Nautilus’s death.

Mariner worked furiously, hacking a century’s worth of transporter protocols to pieces. Every safeguard and limiter that stood between her and getting a lock on Boimler was deleted without mercy. She tried narrowing the sensor beam to pierce the noise, then widening the beam to look for any glimpse of a human life sign, then rerouting more and more power into the transporter system until it, too, threatened to explode. 

The transporter still couldn’t find him.

Boimler’s voice came back pained and rough. They could hear the smoke worsening on his end of the signal. “T'Lyn, our time together was productive and enlightening. Thanks for putting up with me. Live long and prosper.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” The words were soft and simple. But that T'Lyn said them at all to a man who could not hear her spoke volumes.

Mariner felt her insides twisting as she pushed the sensors to their absolute limit. Her vision became blurry again, and her face felt hot. For a moment, she worried that her forehead was still bleeding. But when her lips parted, she only tasted tears.

“Boimler, don’t even pretend like you didn’t rehearse all of this in your head!” Mariner screamed, pounding on the console. “I know you did, you gigantic fucking drama queen!”

“Blowing the last relay in ten seconds. Valve cycle should finish right after. Auxiliary grid should be able to handle remaining residual charge. Great work, guys,” Boimler reported in a gravelly husk of his voice.

“Bring us in closer!” Mariner shouted at the cockpit, even as she knew it wouldn’t help. The Nautilus was a pirouetting mass of debris and fire. Simply matching its course and speed would take minutes of time that they—that Boimler—didn’t have. 

Boimler’s voice crossed the vastness of space one final time as he said, “Mariner, I…I love you.”

Her whole world stopped. The sounds of the shuttle, of Tendi’s sniffling and Rutherford’s ragged breathing, of the constant rumble and hiss coming through the compartment speakers, and the heartbeat pounding in her ears, all vanished. A breath hung in her chest, burning, forgotten. For one single, endless instant, Becket Mariner lived in those words.

I love you.

Then the signal cut out, and time began again. Through the viewport, Mariner watched the Nautilus continue to spin. What few lights remained in its hull went dark as its main power went offline. But the hull itself was still intact. The passenger decks had weathered the rest of the ship’s piecemeal destruction. They had succeeded.

Distantly, Mariner felt someone gently guiding her up from the chair and over to the bench in the back. She heard a flurry of voices calling back and forth, shouting reports to one another, resuming work. Somewhere far off in the cockpit, Grobar sank into the copilot seat, sobbing, watching his ship tumble through the void as the shuttle began to fly through the debris in its wake. But Mariner was lost to all of it.

Bradward Boimler. Gangly limbs, shoulders like a trout. A pallid face forever pinched into an expression of discomfort and framed by a ridiculous coif of purple hair. 

Brave to a fault, and bold when it counted. Brilliant and loyal. He had trusted Mariner with his life.

And she had let him down.

Chapter 2: Condolence Letters

Summary:

With the day saved, Mariner gets some time for reflection.

Captain’s Log, Supplemental: As the shuttle crew reported, the Nautilus is adrift, but stable. Its passengers are alive, reporting only minor injuries, and are currently being beamed aboard the Cerritos into cargo holds, which we are converting into emergency shelters now. The accommodations might not be up to the Nautilus’s standards, but will suffice until we can ferry the survivors back to Pacifica as we resume our operation there.

Lieutenant Mariner and her team are to be highly commended. To rescue the entire ship’s complement from their own warp core as they did with only a single casualty is nothing short of miraculous. Still, I know it comes as no comfort. All we can do now is wait and hope for the best.

 

---

 

Mariner sat at the edge of her biobed, her feet dangling listlessly as she stared across sickbay at the surgical alcove. A sterilization field was erected in the alcove, flashing and crackling each time someone crossed its threshold to move in or out. The air smelled clean, with just a hint of disinfectant, and it ached in her smoke-scorched lungs. Compared to the Nautilus’s engine room, and the flurry of activity from the Kings Canyon’s compartment, sickbay was as quiet as a tomb.

Most of the medical staff on the ship were down in Cargo Bays One and Two, working to help the doomed luxury cruiser’s myriad passengers. The word triage was accurate for their work, but too harsh. None of the cruiser’s survivors had suffered anything worse than a broken bone thanks to the five Starfleet officers’ quick action. None of them would die that day.

The few remaining doctors and nurses were gathered in the surgical suite around a table that held what was left of Bradward Boimler.

When the Nautilus’s core had shut down, the radiation surge had stabilized, making it child’s play for Rutherford to find human biomatter on the engineering deck and transport it into the shuttle. Except, when the transporter beam faded, it had instead retrieved a charred, smoking, gnarled piece of debris. Or so Mariner had thought, until part of the debris opened, and she had seen a flash of too-white teeth inside the blackened char, and had heard the sounds of labored wheezing.

That’s when she’d recognized him. What remained of him. Somehow, unbelievably, still clinging to life.

Tendi had whirled into action, dumping the contents of the shuttle’s medical kit onto the floor and flying through devices with incredible expertise. Though the Orion’s heart belonged to the sciences, Mariner knew that Tendi couldn’t forget her medical roots. Before anything else, Tendi had slapped a device onto the char, aiming somewhere above that gasping, toothy mouth, in a region that might have once been a forehead, and then activated it. Immediately, the wheezing had stopped, and the mouth had closed.

“Cognitive inhibitor,” Tendi had said quietly. “He… That was him trying to scream. His vocal cords…”

She hadn’t spoken again after that. She’d worked diligently, tirelessly, for hours, using every single device in the medkit to keep Boimler’s organs functioning until the Cerritos had finally arrived out of high warp. One emergency transport later, and…

Mariner knew she had seen worse during the war, or during any one of a dozen anomaly investigations. There were weapons and wonders in space that could literally turn a man inside-out, or convert his physical essence into cosmic tapioca. Plasma burns and radiation poisoning were mundane afflictions in Starfleet life.

But seeing that twisted, red-and-black glossy mess that was—that remained—Bradward Boimler had undone Mariner. She sat in a daze, unsure of what to do in that moment, or in any moment beyond it.

Someone grabbed her hand. Instinctively, she jerked it back, balling it up into a fist to lay out whoever was stupid enough to try and touch her.

Doctor T'Ana lifted her hands in mock-surrender. The short Caitian’s fur bristled from the tips of her triangle ears all the way down to the collar of her blue Medical division uniform. “Easy, kid. You’re lucky we’re short-staffed. Normally I’d kick you to the nearest snot-nosed ensign, but we’re a little short-handed at the moment. So I get to score points with my boss by treating her little girl’s skinned knee.”

As the doctor’s rough hands began testing Mariner’s injured arm, Mariner let out a hiss of pain, and jutted her chin toward the surgical suite. “You should be over there,” she snapped.

T'Ana’s eyes flashed, her slitted pupils narrowing at the mere thought of someone else telling her what to do in her own sickbay. But then she shook her head, as though deciding that Mariner wasn’t worth the effort. Mariner herself was hard-pressed to disagree.

“They’re prepping him now. A conductor can’t work until the orchestra’s set up,” T'Ana said pompously as she scanned Mariner. “You’ve got a hairline fracture and some nasty burns. Cranial laceration. Mild concussion. Minor radiation exposure. Smoke inhalation. One second.”

As the doctor rummaged for the right instruments, Mariner’s eyes drifted back across sickbay. She didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t stop herself. “What are his chances?”

Raising an eyebrow at the far table, T'Ana admitted, “Pretty fucking slim. Better, now that he’s with us. Tendi did a good job getting him here.”

Underneath the bioregenerator’s light, Mariner’s arm flashed white hot, making her hiss. An instant later, there was an almost narcotic absence of pain as the bone finished knitting itself back together. That blissful sensation spread as T'Ana worked the light slowly over the rest of Mariner’s body, lifting her arms and feet, and eventually standing her up to get at her backside. The regenerative field passed right through Mariner’s blackened, sweat-soaked uniform, putting her to right in less than two minutes.

T'Ana finished at Mariner’s upturned palms, letting the regenerator linger on her open hands. “These look worse than the rest of you. Did you high-five a console while it was exploding?”

“It was…” Mariner choked, and swallowed. “When we beamed him off the wreck, he was still hot.” She remembered recognizing that twisted mass of flesh, and lunging to grab him, as if to convince herself he was real. The mere touch of him had seared her palms.

Grunting, T'Ana nodded and finished with Mariner’s hands. When the bioregenerator cycle completed, Mariner felt physically whole again, and T’Ana said, “You’re cleared for duty. The Captain wants to see you up top. But if you’re not up to it right now—”

“I’m fine. I’m going,” Mariner said. “Thanks, doc.”

T'Ana grabbed her by the freshly healed arm, stopping Mariner. “Kid,” she said, and dropped her nigh-permanent feline sneer, “we’re gonna do everything we can. Don’t give up yet.”

Mariner snorted a silent, bitter laugh. “It’s not over until the fat lady sings, huh?” she said.

Those furry brows of hers lowered in determination as T'Ana said, “Fuck the fat lady. It’s not over until I say so.” 

The words drew a wisp of a smile across Mariner’s lips. “Thank you,” she said, and meant it.

But T'Ana turned away, ignoring Mariner’s gratitude as she strode across sickbay. She plunged into the sterilization field like a force of nature, lifting her voice to fill the entire deck. “Alright, my blue fairies! Somebody dropped a sack of puppet parts on our doorstep, and it’s up to us to make him Pinocchio again! I want clean cuts, steady nerves, and every goddamn piece of equipment I need handed to me before I even tell you I need it. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Doctor!” the staff chanted as Mariner left.

 

---

 

“Good Lord, Beckett!” Captain Carol Freeman swore as Mariner entered her ready room. “I didn’t mean for T'Ana to discharge you straight to the bridge. You could have taken a minute for yourself.”

Mariner started to retort, but her snide rejoinder died in her throat. For a moment, she thought she’d seen her mother’s authoritative mask slip. A familiar expression of worry had flashed across those weathered features. It tickled the back of Mariner’s memory, but she couldn’t place where she had seen her mother look at her quite like that before.

The moment passed too quickly to ponder on it. So Mariner just shrugged at her own scorched, smoky uniform, and said, “You asked me to report for duty. Here I am, Captain.”

Freeman sighed. Mariner wondered if those worry lines on her mother’s forehead actually deepened with every disappointment Mariner inflicted on her, or if it was just Mariner’s imagination. Setting aside a PADD, Freeman gestured to the chair opposite her desk.

Dreading the lecture to come, Mariner flopped down into the chair and put on the bored look of disaffection she’d been practicing since she’d turned twelve. If a lecture was about to happen, she wanted to skip the precursor and jump straight to the end where they shouted at each other. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

“Hear what?” Freeman asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

“Read me the riot act, already,” Mariner snapped impatiently. “You sent me on a maintenance call, and I blew up most of the ship I was supposed to fix, and almost got everybody killed.”

Freeman blinked slowly, staring at her. Mariner suddenly wondered if she had misread the tone of this conversation. She squirmed uncomfortably, worried that it was about to get somehow worse.

“Beckett,” her mother said, “You and your team saved the lives of over two hundred people. I’m putting a commendation in your record for valorous action and ingenuity.”

Mariner squirmed harder. Surely this was the leadup to a heel-turn. Any moment, her mother would sneer and announce the joke, and turn her PADD around to reveal Mariner’s demotion, or another transfer to Starbase Eighty. “Did you somehow miss the part where we blew up the ship?” she asked.

Freeman leaned back and steepled her fingers. “I had time during the trip to Aldonta to look up the Nautilus. She took a beating at the Battle of Cardassia, and Fleet Command figured it wasn’t worth it to give her a frame-up restoration. She was too old, so they mothballed her. This ‘Captain Grobar’ bought the wreck at auction, then had her towed to Ferenginar. And the Ferengi aren’t exactly known for their stringent safety requirements. It’s not a stretch to assume he cut a few corners to get her spaceworthy again. Everyone on that ship is lucky you were there to do what you did.”

Gradually, Mariner straightened in her seat. “So, I’m not in trouble?” she asked cautiously.

“You’re lucky I don’t pin a medal to you,” Freeman retorted. “I know how much you hate dress uniforms.”

“They make us look like cater-waiters,” Mariner groused. “I mean, seriously, white jackets with gold piping? Way to undercut our credibility, Uniform Dress Code. You might as well just put us back in miniskirts.”

Chuckling, Freeman agreed, “We’ll keep it to a commendation, then.”

Brightening, Mariner quickly added, “Don’t forget about the rest of my team. Tendi and Rutherford figured out how to avert the core breach.”

“No one’s going unrecognized,” Freeman assured her.

“And Boimler…” She sagged back into her chair, slumping again. “He’s the one who came up with the controlled overload. He should get the medal, or whatever.”

Freeman gave her a long, searching look, and then asked, “How is our Mister Boimler?”

“Extra-crispy,” Mariner quipped. When her dark humor failed to elicit a laugh or an admonishment, she cringed, and said, “Tendi was basically pumping his heart for him by the time the Cerritos got here. Doctor T'Ana doesn’t think he has much of a chance.”

“And how are you dealing with it?” Freeman asked softly.

Mariner shrugged. “I’m fine. I mean, sure, it’s my nightmare. Leading someone I care about to their death. Being powerless to do anything to help them. Knowing that if I’d been a little smarter, or a little faster, they wouldn’t be dying in sickbay.” She drew a long, deep breath, and then smiled. “What do I have to complain about, right?”

“Beckett,” Freeman said, “if you need a few days…”

That same worried look slipped back into her mother’s features, and suddenly, Mariner remembered where she had seen that expression before. It was the exact same expression her mother had worn when she’d met up with Mariner after her first deployment in the Dominion War. Mariner had rotated off the front lines to find her mother waiting for her at Starbase Twelve as she got off the ship, wearing that exact expression. It was worry, and fear, and relief, and dread, and guilt, all hidden in a failed attempt at putting on a brave face. It was an expression that said, I am so goddamn glad you’re alive, and I feel so fucking bad about it because a lot of other people’s kids aren’t coming home like you are, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when you leave to go back out there.

Unable to look at that expression again, Mariner let her eyes drop. Her attention drifted to the PADD her mother had set aside. The upside-down names at the top of the PADD gave her pause as she recognized them. She snatched the PADD from the desk before her mother could stop her, and read aloud from the top of the open document. “Dear Mister and Missus Boimler, it is my solemn duty to inform you that your son…”

Freeman tried to grab the PADD out of Mariner’s hands, and ended up sprawled across her own desk. “Beckett, give that back!” she snapped.

“What the fuck, Mom!” Beckett yelled, scooting her chair back to keep the PADD out of reach. “T'Ana’s elbow-deep in Boimler right now, and you’re already prepping your condolence letter? What, were you worried you might fall behind on paperwork? Wanted to get this out of the way so you could just hit ‘SEND’ when sickbay calls you with the bad news?”

“It’s not like that!” Freeman cursed and hauled herself around her desk, running after her daughter and the PADD.

But Mariner leapt from her chair and darted away, leading Freeman on a chase through the small room. “And you didn’t even do it right! Here, let me fix it for you!” snarled Mariner. She thumbed the ‘COMPOSE’ icon on the PADD, and began to recite, “Dear Parents of a Dumbass…”

“Beckett!” Freeman roared.

The rational parts of Mariner knew that what she was doing was insane. But some floodgate had burst open inside of her, and Mariner was too tired to hold it back anymore. She was done: done with the day, done with the mission, done with protocol, and done acting rationally. 

“It is my rad duty to inform you that your dipshit son cooked himself because he didn’t listen to his friend!” Mariner shouted at the PADD as she doubled back around behind the desk. As they barrelled past, she and her mother dislodged an entire shelf of Freeman’s trinkets, leaving them scattered behind them as they continued to circle the ready room. “Sorry for the inconvenience. Here are some ashes. They’re mostly his. Go and spread ‘em in the vineyard, make them raisins big and sweet!”

Presently, Mariner noticed that she was no longer being chased. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw Freeman leaning on her knees and huffing for breath. Evidently being a captain didn’t leave much extra time for cardio training. “It’s a… It’s…” Freeman puffed. “God damn. You used to be…easier to deal with…when your legs were…shorter…”

“Yeah, you used to catch me right away whenever I tried to bolt from a calculus lesson,” Mariner said. But her smirk quickly crumbled under the weight of the PADD’s message. “Mom, he’s not even dead yet. This is just ghoulish!”

“It’s a good luck charm…” Freeman managed to say.

Cautiously, Mariner approached her mother, wary of another grab for the PADD. But Freeman seemed content to let her have it for the moment, and accepted Mariner’s help back to her chair, where she finished catching her breath. 

Mopping the sweat back into her dreadlocks, Freeman said, “When I got my first command, I dreaded this part of the job. Sending letters to families. Trying to sum up someone’s life, someone’s sacrifice, in a handful of words on a screen. It’s impossible to honor something like that in a stupid letter. But it happens to every captain eventually, and I was no exception. A routine away mission went wrong, and one of my ensigns was exposed to a local neurotoxin. Touched the wrong slug down on the planet, or something. I don’t really remember the details.”

Mariner winced as she sat back down across from Freeman. “Yeah, never pet the wildlife. That’s Away Team One-Oh-One.”

“It put him in a coma. By the time we got him to sickbay, he was just an empty body. My CMO gave him less than a one percent chance of coming out of it. So, I sat down to write the damn letter,” Freeman recalled. “And I kept starting over. Over and over. Every time I finished a paragraph, I just deleted it and tried again, for two whole days. Then, just as I figured out how to move onto the next paragraph, sickbay called me to report that he’d woken up. Whatever treatment the doctors did, it pulled him back. Turns out he just needed time. And I got to delete the letter.”.

“So,” drawled Mariner, “because some ensign got lucky, now you write condolence letters for everyone ahead of time?”

“Everyone who still has a chance to recover,” Freeman said, nodding. “I start it as soon as I can. That way, if they pull through, I get to delete another letter. It’s happened more than a few times now,” she finished, and smiled.

“And for the times when it didn’t happen?” Mariner asked softly.

Her smile faltered as Freeman admitted, “Well, if it worked every time, it wouldn’t be a good luck charm. They’d just call it ‘medicine.’”

Even medicine doesn’t work every time, Mariner thought, but wisely chose not to say. Instead, she slid the PADD back across the desk. “Thanks, Mom. That’s actually kind of sweet…in a really morbid way.”

“It gets me through the day,” Freeman agreed. “Look, Beckett, I was serious about giving you some time. This installation job on Pacifica is routine. We can get by without you for a couple of days.”

Mariner shook her head vehemently. “No way. I’m good. Really.”

But Freeman hardly seemed convinced. “I know you and Boimler are close. I’ll admit, I didn’t think you were ‘that’ close. But you’ve never felt the need to loop me in on these kinds of things, so I shouldn’t be surprised.”

A shock ran through Mariner. “Wait. Did you pick up his transmission? What did you hear? Which, um, parts did you hear?” she asked, trying and failing to smother her panicky tone.

With a soft chuckle, Freeman asked, “Do you mean the part where said he loves you, or the part where he disobeyed orders to save your ass?”

Mariner felt a cold stab of dread. “Ohmygod, you are not court-martialing him for that, are you? Because I will fill the computer core with queso again just to erase the evidence, I swear!” Demotion and punishment for herself, Mariner could handle, but she wasn’t about to let Boimler suffer any of it.

“No,” Freeman said, her smile growing sly. “He actually did the right thing in getting you out of there. You had a head injury and might have been compromised.”

“Oh.” Mariner sat back in her chair. “Well. Good. I mean, he was wrong, and I was fine. But…good.”

“Never thought he had it in him. But I’m happy for you two,” Freeman said warmly. “And I know T'Ana will—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait!” Mariner said, crossing her arms. “It is not like that at all. Boimler and I are just friends. Best friends, yeah. But he’s like a…” She became acutely aware that she was talking to her mother and her captain, and dialed back her simile by three or four degrees of cruelty. “He’s like a walking, talking rule book. Not exactly my type.”

“Mmhm,” Freeman grunted.

Exasperated, Mariner sprang from her chair and grumbled, “Whatever. Can I be dismissed, Captain? I’ve got a report to write.”

Nodding, Freeman leaned back and took up her PADD again. “Dismissed, Lieutenant.” Then, as Mariner left, she added, “And don’t half-ass that report. Captain Grobar has already filed three complaints with Starfleet since we beamed him aboard. You’ll want documentation to cover your ass.”

“Something tells me he’ll be too busy with about two hundred lawsuits to follow up with Starfleet,” Mariner retorted on her way out the door.

 

---

 

In the dark, cozy comfort of the supply closet, sitting on a throne made from crates of spare conduit parts, with her feet propped up on a box of her own contraband, it occurred to Mariner that she hadn’t gotten properly closet drunk since becoming a JG again. And that day seemed as good a time as any to catch up on the truly important things.

One of the many bottles liberated from her footrest sat in the crook of her arm. Its contents sloshed inside its green glass as she shifted, trying to find a comfortable position. Starfleet engineers hadn’t designed their crates to be ergonomic, and didn’t seem to be receptive to notes on the matter. But the alcohol made her comfortable enough as she brooded inside the closet, lit only with the faint glow of her PADD.

No, not brooded. She lounged. Relaxed. Kept it casual while she wrote her report on the Nautilus incident. Unfortunately, she hadn’t made much progress, aside from putting the names and stardate into the template.

The top portion of her PADD was windowed with a separate feed while the bottom window displayed her empty report. In the top feed, a series of notes and updates were listed, with a new line populating once or twice an hour. Or, at least, that had been the update rate since she’d started watching. How long ago had that been?

She lifted the bottle, savoring the sweet burn as it traveled down her throat and warmed the pit in her stomach. 

The closet door slid open, unleashing a hellstorm of corridor light that made Mariner hiss and shield her eyes. “Fuck outta here!” she snarled blindly at the door, little caring who was on the other side. If it was an ensign, or another JG, she could hurl insults until they ran in terror. And if it was a superior officer, well…Mariner liked the brig just fine. 

“Found her,” a familiar voice said. A silhouette filled the door frame, and as Mariner’s eyes adjusted, she recognized Rutherford entering the supply closet. 

Tendi appeared a second later, squeezing around Rutherford as he closed the closet door behind them and turned the lighting up to low. Even in the pale light, the worry in Tendi’s eyes shone brightly. “Well, it’s not ‘worse’ than we expected, so that’s a plus,” she said to Rutherford.

“Oh, it’s you two,” Mariner said. “Fuck outta here. I’m doing important Lieutenant shit.”

“Come on, Mariner,” Rutherford said, picking his way carefully through the cramped space to take a seat across from her on a flatpack of blank isolinear chips. “We had to check six of your other stashes before we found you in this one.”

“Yeah, leaving your combadge in a turbolift was a dirty trick,” Tendi scolded her, pointing to the empty front of Mariner’s uniform. “The computer kept sending us up and down decks looking for you until we caught up with it and figured out what you did.”

“Gee,I wonder where I got the idea to mess around with combadges,” Mariner grunted. But she could see that neither of her friends had any intention of leaving her to wallow—lounge—so she pushed the armrests of her crate-throne wider and scooted to one edge, motioning for Tendi to sit next to her. “So what’s up?” she belched.

Tendi fit snugly next to Mariner, looping her arm over Mariner’s shoulder to squeeze into the makeshift throne. “When we couldn’t find you after our shift ended, we figured you were doing this.” Gently, she lifted the bottle from Mariner’s arm and held it up to her face, squinting in the dark to examine its murky contents.

“Go ahead and take it from me. I’ve got, like, ten more,” Mariner said, and tapped her heel on her contraband footrest. “And, like, a dozen other different booze caches all over the ship. The whole universe is my secret bar.”

She expected a look of concern, or even disappointment. Instead, Mariner was surprised when Tendi tilted the bottle and took a long, strong swallow from it without so much as a twitch. When she lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, Tendi saw Mariner’s surprise, and offered a tiny smile. “If we all drink it together, it’ll mean less of it goes in you,” Tendi said, and passed the bottle over to Rutherford. 

Rutherford nodded, and took his own swig. “Yeah, and we—AUGH!” As the afterburn assaulted him, Rutherford collapsed off his stack of boxes, landing hard on his knees as he clutched his throat. “What is this stuff? Warp plasma?” he rasped.

“Dunno,” Mariner said, taking the bottle from his limp hand. “Bought it off a Naussican at our stop on Telluris III. There’s a nonzero chance that it’s actually floor cleaner.” And she took another long pull from the bottle.

“If you puke, then it’d be that much easier to clean,” Tendi pointed out. “Smart. We’ll raise a glass to Boimler!”

Mariner rolled her eyes. “He’s not dead, Tendi.”

Rutherford re-seated himself and took the bottle with a shaky hand. “Then we’ll drink it to his good health!” He took another, more cautious drink, and then passed the bottle to Tendi with a wan smile. “So, how’s your head?” he coughed.

Mariner eyed the shadowed faces of her friends, who had combed the ship just to sit with her in a closet. She loved them for their worry. And she couldn’t help but be irritated at their coddling. “It’s fine. Doc waved a light over it,” she grunted. “Besides, I’m not the one to worry about.”

Tendi killed the last of the bottle without flinching. “Do you know how he’s doing?” she asked.

Glancing down at her PADD, Mariner said, “Six hours of surgery, and no real change. They’re still just scraping all the dead bits off of him, which is the easy part.”

The specificity of her answer made Tendi frown. She craned her neck to read the top window of Mariner’s PADD, and exclaimed, “Are you patched into sickbay’s logs?”

“Yup. Built a backdoor for myself to most of the ship systems when we were assigned to the computer overhaul last year. Comes in handy when I need the juicy gossip as it happens,” said Mariner. 

She seriously contemplated opening another bottle of what she almost hoped was actually floor cleaner. To think that any spacefaring species would brew something that appalling for consumption was almost too much to bear.

“Yikes. That is wildly illegal and unethical just from a patients’ privacy stance,” said Tendi.

Mariner held her wrists up, miming handcuffs. “You can use my PADD to report me,” she said.

“I think we can let it slide for now,” Rutherford said. 

Mariner knew he was already compiling a list of diagnostics to run that would close her backdoors. Which she didn’t mind. There were always more security exploits to discover. He might be one hell of an engineer, but Rutherford didn’t have a prayer if he thought he could out-sneak Mariner. She opened her mouth, ready to tell him as much.

“Why do you think he said all that stuff?” Mariner heard herself say instead.

Looks of surprise pierced the darkness as Tendi and Rutherford stared at her. Mariner swore silently, wondering if there was any way to suck the words back into her mouth and un-say them. 

“Boimler? I…I guess he was trying to say goodbye,” Tendi murmured, “in case we didn’t get him back. But we did! So, it’s okay…”

“Yeah, you know how Boimler is,” Rutherford added eagerly. “Do you know how many times I’ve pretended I didn’t catch him gazing out the window of our room through his own reflection while he was doing a personal log in his ‘captain’ voice? He can’t help himself.”

Nodding, Mariner sank back, letting her weight settle against Tendi’s comfortable warmth. Bradward Boimler would commemorate every bowel movement with a big speech before flushing if he thought he could get away with it. Grandiloquence was his native tongue. She laughed, and drew a long, cleansing breath, ready to say as much and lighten the mood in the closet.

“He told me he loves me,” Mariner heard herself say instead.

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to drink heavily after suffering a head injury…

Another long pause. More searching glances. Then Tendi squeezed Mariner in a sideways hug, and said, “Well, sure. He loves you. We love you! And we’re pretty sure you love us too.”

“At least enough to share your floor polish with us,” Rutherford added. 

Screw it. Her mouth was blazing a trail that the rest of her desperately did not want to follow, but it was too late to turn back. So she fully committed instead. “Yeah, but he didn’t say, ‘I love you guys,’ or ‘I love you, man.’ He said all that great stuff for you two, and T'Lyn, and then he said…that…to me,” Mariner said.

An even longer pause. This time, Tendi and Rutherford stared at each other, their eyebrows rising.

“Uh-uh. No. Stop it,” Mariner spat. “You don’t get to do your ‘Tenderford Telepathy’ right now. Out loud, please.”

“Our what?” Rutherford said, confused.

“You know, that thing you do, where you have an entire conversation just by looking at each other because you don’t want to say something in front of someone. I swear, I should use my backdoor into sickbay just to make sure neither of you is part-Betazoid,” complained Mariner.

Hesitating, Tendi and Rutherford exchanged glances again.

“There! That! Stop doing that!” Mariner yelled.

“Okay, okay!” pleaded Tendi, leaning back from Mariner’s wrath. “It’s just…maybe Boimler does love you.”

“Duh. Obviously,” Mariner scoffed. “I’m amazing, and I’ve saved his life, like, a hundred times, and I’ve mentored him through his entire career. Yet somehow, mine is the only ass he doesn’t deign to kiss. Ungrateful.”

“Right,” Tendi drawled, “except…maybe he ‘loves’ you.”

Mariner’s eyes widened. “What? No. Ew,” she said. “Boimler likes soft girls. Girls who he can bring teddy bears, and whose hair he can brush, and who he can hold hands with while he goes skipping through flowery meadows.”

“Wait, is all that stuff bad? It sounds really nice,” Rutherford asked, confused.

“Well,” hedged Tendi, “do you love Boimler?”

“Duh. Obviously,” Mariner scoffed again. “He’s my friend. And he’s fun to tease. Especially when his face screws up and goes red and he does that little squeal. Hhhumph! Hhaaammph! I mean, I can’t do it, but you know the one.”

“But do you ‘love’ him?” pressed Rutherford.

“What? No! Ew!” cried Mariner. “He’s like what would happen if Q snapped his fingers and turned the concept of boring into a real boy.”

“Is that why you’re freaked out by what he said?” Tendi asked.

“I am not freaked out!” bellowed Mariner. “I am having a perfectly reasonable reaction to something fucked-up that my dying friend said to me!”

She huffed, and watched her friends recoiling, their faces tight with shock and hurt. The anger drained out of her, leaving her cold. She wanted nothing more than to bolt from the closet. Maybe she could hijack a shuttle, or hide in the ship’s nacelles. Get away until everything blew over, or at least until everyone felt too awkward to call her on her bullshit. It’s what the old Mariner would have done. Back before she’d met Tendi, and Rutherford, and…

Slowly, Mariner sank back in her crate-throne, pooling herself against the armrest opposite Tendi. “Goddamnit,” Mariner muttered, squeezing her eyes shut. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Rutherford said, and leaned forward again tentatively.

“No, it’s not. Yelling at you guys is not okay. Making you guys worry about me is not okay. Talking shit about Boimler—behind his back instead of to his stupid face—is not okay.” Mariner smiled wanly. “I appreciate you guys coming to find me. Really.”

Tendi sagged back into Mariner, wrapping an arm back around her shoulder. “We can leave if you really want some alone time,” she offered.

But Mariner shook her head. “No way,” she said, and passed her PADD to Tendi. “It turns out I suck at doing ‘important Lieutenant shit.’ Which could bite me in the ass this time, because there’s a pissed-off Bolian who wants to sue the tits off my career. So you two are going to help me write my report on this fiasco while we, as a team, are going to empty another one of these.” And she bent forward, collecting another green bottle out of her stash.

“Hooray,” Rutherford groaned. “My insides will be so sparkly…”

Chapter 3: The Conspicuous Absence of Lieutenant Locke

Summary:

Mariner’s terrible, awful, no good, very bad day prompts her into an unexpected trip down memory lane.

First Officer’s Log, Supplemental: Despite numerous setbacks today, we remain on-schedule to complete installation on the Southern Number Fifty-Eight canal refurbishment tomorrow. The route closures and detours in the canal system aren’t earning Starfleet any admirers among Pacifica’s commuters. A lot of important people come here for different reasons—commerce, conferences, plenty of tourism—but the only thing they all seem to have in common is that they’re being inconvenienced by us. If we don’t finish on-schedule, we’ll definitely be hearing about it from Command. And it would push back our shore leave on Karisstaria in a few weeks, maybe even cancel it. And then I’ll definitely be hearing about it from the crew.

To that end, I’ve made a hard decision that will “streamline” the installation process going forward. I just hope it doesn’t get me killed…

 

---

 

“No.”

Mariner clenched her jaw, biting back her first, far less polite reply. Who said she had no self-control? “Why not?” she demanded.

In front of Mariner, Doctor T’Ana stood steadfast, her arms folded across her maroon surgical scrubs. Her eyes were sunken, and her whiskers drooped more than usual, but her expression remained one of wrought iron. “Because I said so. Because it’s against protocol. Because it’d be a violation of the patient’s medical privacy rights. Or because I fucking said so. Feel free to pick any one of ‘em, but my personal favorite is that last one,” said T’Ana.

Her jaw tightened until she could hear her molars straining against each other. After a lousy day of working the Pacifica canals refit job, Mariner was in no mood to be told no. One thing had gone wrong after another, making her shift feel like an eternity.

And watching the surgical updates trickle onto her PADD’s feed once every few hours hadn’t helped the day go any faster. Now, all she wanted to do was check on Boimler. And even that wasn’t going right.

Craning her neck, Mariner looked over the Caitian’s stooped shoulder to the surgical alcove at the far end of sickbay. The air still hummed with the active sterilization field, but she could no longer see the surgical table or equipment being used. A privacy curtain had been erected, a permeable, opaque holographic field of soft blue light that surrounded the entire alcove. Highly directed sound dampening fields made the barrier soundproof as well. As Mariner watched, a pair of nurses dressed in matching maroon scrubs and masks emerged through the curtain, passing like ghosts through a wall.

“Why is the privacy screen up?” Mariner said. She tried leaning around the surly doctor, as if that would give her a better view behind the holographic wall.

T’Ana scowled, and leaned to block Mariner again. “Because he was bumming everyone out. Now fuck off. We’re about to start the next surgery.”

Clenching her whole body, Mariner purged the anger from her tone. It wouldn’t kill her to be polite. Or, it wouldn’t kill her right away, at least. “I’m not gonna stay. I just… Let me see him. Just for a second. Please?”

But T’Ana’s furred features remained hardened. “You already have my answer. What you should be doing is fucking off. Better hop to it.”

Mariner felt herself rising to her full height, about to do something that would likely land her in the brig, when her combadge interrupted. “Lieutenant Mariner,” came Ransom’s voice, “report to my office.”

T’Ana’s whiskers twitched smugly. “Saved by the bell,” she said, and turned back toward the surgical alcove, lifting her mask back over her face. “Run along, kid.”

Trembling with a barely restrained fury, Mariner smashed her combadge with a fist and growled, “On my way.”

She stalked out of sickbay and made for the nearest turbolift. A whorl of nasty scenarios spun in her head. I could program the transporter to beam her into the middle of Cetacean Ops every morning, she thought. Not deep enough to drown her, but almost. Matt and Kimolu wouldn’t let her die anyway. Not even if I asked them nicely.

The thought must have settled into her features, because she noticed Delta Shift’s officers pressing themselves to the corridor walls to get out of her way. Mariner took the turbolift ride and the short walk down Deck Two’s corridor to smooth out her expression before she walked into Ransom’s office.

Little more than a tiny Ops center that had been commandeered for his private use, Ransom’s office still sported a few perks of command: chiefly, an enormous window with a clear view. After all, a first officer shouldn’t need to stare at a nacelle or the secondary hull all day as he managed the ship and crew. What he apparently did need, instead, were the kilos and kilos of weight training equipment scattered about the room. Dumbbells, barbells, kettle weights, all sat in careful disarray around a weight bench and a pull-up bar erected in front of a full-length mirror. Despite the environmental controls’ best efforts, the room always smelled of sweat and myriad protein supplements. 

But in a rare instance of restraint, Commander Jack Ransom was not pumping iron. He sat behind his desk, fully uniformed and with his insistently perfect posture, staring down at a PADD on his desk. His free hand worked at a grip trainer, squeezing and releasing it unconsciously as he read. Without looking up, he gestured for Mariner to take the chair opposite his while the doors closed behind her.

Sensing the ass-chewing to come, Mariner took her time finding her seat. She pretended to examine the training equipment, running her finger across the barbell on the bench as if looking for dust. “Looking good today, Commander. The stubble is on-point. Perfect length. What are you benching these days? One-forty? One-fifty?”

An impatient sigh whistled through his nose. Setting the grip trainer aside, he ran a hand through his thick, sandy hair, and fixed her with a pointed look. “Mariner, I’m putting you on medical leave,” he told her.

Mariner collapsed in shock, landing on the weight bench and leaning on the barbell for support. She had been expecting some fallout from her terrible day, but medical leave? “Are you kidding me? Why?” she insisted.

“Look, you were second-to-last out of the Nautilus before it…” His lantern jaw tightened as he reconsidered his words. “Given what happened, nobody will look twice at the time on your record. You’ll take a few days to recover—”

“Recover?” Mariner exclaimed. “I’m fine! Just because I made a few mistakes today…”

Too late, Mariner realized that she had stepped right into Ransom’s rhetorical trap. He lifted the PADD and began to recite, “Oh-Nine-Twenty Hours, planetside: Lieutenant Mariner neglects to confirm the seal on a plate of subnautical casing, resulting in a pressure failure that blows Ensign Frillton off his feet, resulting in minor injuries. The team is required to start over installing the entire section.”

“I apologized for that,” Mariner insisted, feeling her cheeks heat, “and I even knitted Frillton’s ribs back together with the medkit myself. We’re cool now.”

“Twelve-Thirty Hours, shuttlecraft approaching planetside: Lieutenant Mariner, at the controls, starts the landing sequence ten full seconds late, requiring manual control intervention to prevent collision with the landing pad.” He glared over the top of the PADD and added, “Ensign Sri’lak says you almost took her head off with the shuttle’s nacelle when you came in hot.”

“That’s not… Sri’lak is a Kelpien!” Mariner objected. “She’s, like, three meters tall! She almost takes her head off just walking through a doorway! If you’re gonna be that tall, learn to hunch!”

“Fourteen-Hundred Hours, shipside,” Ransom continued down the list. “The shuttle going down to Site Gamma is reported as being short by almost half the necessary components. Inventory is double-checked by the flight crew, who discover that the officer responsible for loading and checking their inventory—Lieutenant Mariner—has missed three entire rows of crates marked for transport to the surface.”

“We’re servicing, like, a hundred canals, and they’re all getting the same parts! All the boxes look alike! Sue me!” Mariner shouted, throwing up her hands. “Also, that last one’s really weak compared to the other two.”

“They're chronological.” Ransom’s voice remained level as he set the PADD aside. “And these are just the things that made it into the reports. I’ve talked to Beta Shift, and every one of them told me your head was anywhere else but on your work today. You may think it’s a dull job, but it’s still dangerous—”

“I know that—” Mariner tried to interrupt.

But Ransom shook his head, and continued, “—which is why you’re being relieved. I won’t risk our schedule, let alone somebody’s life, because your head isn’t in the game, Mariner.”

“This is bullshit!” Mariner exploded from the bench, pacing back and forth in a desperate search for something, anything, she could get her hands on. 

She settled on a rack of dumbbells, and seized the top of the rack to throw it to the ground and spill its weights across the floor. Unfortunately, the fully-loaded rack weighed even more than it looked, and Mariner was barely able to lift one corner of the rack before her arms gave out, letting the corner thump back onto the carpet. Undeterred, she braced one foot against the wall and heaved with her whole body, tilting the weight rack inch by painful inch off its footing.

“Would you like some help with that?” Ransom asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Shut up,” Mariner grunted, straining. “Almost… Almost… There!” 

The rack finally tipped past the point of no return and toppled onto its side. Its weights landed in a clatter, then rolled gently to a stop on the carpet less than a meter away.

“That’s…what I think…of your…medical…leave…” Mariner panted, and heaved herself into the chair across from him. 

As she caught her breath, she waited for a lecture, or for an angry tirade. But all she saw in Ransom was quiet disappointment and concern, which made her face burn even hotter with shame. 

“This is about Boimler, isn’t it?” 

Her stomach lurched, and she hid her face in her hands. “You heard what he said too? Is anyone left on the ship that doesn’t know about this?” she groaned. 

However, when she looked again, she saw his confused expression waiting for her. “What he said? I meant that he was part of your team on the Nautilus. Losing a friend under your command isn’t easy. And it never gets easier.”

She sighed, and sagged forward. “Right. Sorry, I thought you meant…something else.”

Ransom frowned, but then his eyebrows rose in understanding. “Oh, you were talking about what he said over the emergency channel. Sure, I was on-duty when we caught the distress call. The whole bridge crew heard it.”

Mariner’s innards plummeted. She buried her face in her hands again.

“I didn’t think much of it at the time,” Ransom said, shrugging. “People say wild stuff when they’re about to die. When I was a lieutenant, I caught a disruptor to the kidney. The team in sickbay said I kept babbling about some koala while they put me back together. But if it wasn’t just talk, then you and Boimler…?”

“God, no,” Mariner said through her hands. “Boimler is like some kind of bug-eyed fish that grew legs and learned to wear a uniform. We’re just friends.”

“Given that description, I can see why,” Ransom said dryly. “But whatever the case, it doesn’t change my decision.”

Lowering her hands, Mariner dropped all the bravado and insubordination she had tried and failed to muster. All that remained in her was a gentle, persistent ache of something else. Something she was desperate to leave unexamined. “Jack, I am begging you. Please do not put me on leave. If I don’t have something to keep myself busy, I will go insane.”

He tapped his PADD. “Then you tell me what you need, Mariner. Because I can’t let ‘this’ happen again.”

After a moment’s thought, she said, “Put me on ensign work.”

Ransom frowned. “Mariner, we had you doing inventory by the end of your shift. That is ensign work.”

“Then put me on ensign-er work,” she insisted. “I’ll scrub the holodeck filters, or lube the turbolifts. It doesn’t matter. Just…please.”

He fixed her with a long, silent, searching look. Her chest burned, and Mariner realized that she had been holding her breath, only breathing again when he picked up his PADD. “I’ll assign you to Cargo Bay Five until further notice,” he said.

Mariner sucked a breath through her teeth. Cargo Bay Five contained all of the Cerritos’s miscellaneous ship components. It held crates and crates of mundane parts: stem bolts, deck plating, isolinear cables, and a thousand other items too essential to go without, but too trivial to replicate on a case-by-case basis. The Engineering Department treated the bay like their own private storage, and while engineers valued precision in their builds, they collectively gave zero shits about their storage. Cases and crates were haphazardly accessed as needed, left open with their components shuffled or strewn about, with no real organization at play. The entire ship referred to the cargo bay using an old human colloquialism: the Junk Drawer.

But after hearing a list of her own screw-ups, or at least the ones that had made it into the ship’s logs, Mariner had little room to complain. “I’ll take it,” she said, sighing.

“Good. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure if you’d actually listen to reason,” Ransom said as he entered her new assignment into the ship’s schedule on his PADD. “I half-expected you to take a swing at me.”

 She chuckled. “If today keeps up, it’ll be you or T’Ana,” she said.

He frowned suddenly. “Do you want to go to the brig?” he asked.

Mariner held up her hands and said quickly, “Whoa, Jack, it was just a joke.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “what I mean is: do you want to deal with this in the brig? Because I’ll invent some minor infraction and let you stew in there for as long as you want. It won’t look as good on your record as medical leave, but nobody aboard would be surprised to see you in there, at least.”

She sat in stunned silence at the offer. Plenty of senior officers had threatened her with time in the brig. No one had ever offered it to her as something she might need. Was she really that low? That pathetic? “Tempting, but I’ll pass,” she said.

Ransom nodded. “Frankly, if you were anyone else, I’d be kicking you straight to Doctor Migleemo. But something tells me you don’t respond to traditional therapy with a counselor,” he said.

“Oh, I respond. Usually with phaser fire,” Mariner quipped, relieved to be putting the conversation onto less serious footing. 

“Dismissed, Lieutenant. Get some rest. You’ll need it tomorrow,” Ransom said. “And don’t worry about the mess. I’m particular about how I stack my weights.”

Flushed with embarrassment, Mariner squeaked, “Yeah, sorry about that. Thanks.” And she made a hasty exit while he circled his desk to set his weight rack upright once more. 

With her shift long over, and no duty to perform, Mariner found herself gravitating slowly toward her quarters. Her friends from Beta Shift were probably settling into an evening at the crew lounge, but she balked at the idea of joining them. After her performance that day, she doubted anyone would be glad to see her, and she didn’t feel in the mood for social drinking anyway. And after that morning’s hangover, she didn’t feel a need to get closet drunk again anytime soon. 

That’s what happened, she decided. I was just hungover today. If I lay off the Naussican floor polish, I’ll be fine.

Mariner scoffed at her own weak lie. She had worked hungover any number of times, and almost always without incident. The worst it ever cost her was puking her breakfast back up before reporting for duty. A hangover had never rattled her as badly as…

I love you.

Over and over, those words kept rolling through her head. Nightmares of watching the Nautilus explode from the safety of the shuttlecraft had plagued her sleep, ending every time in the same way, with those words rolling through her like a cold wind before the comms went dead. They lingered with her into the waking world, and stayed with her throughout the day, growing louder with each recurrence. 

I love you.

All day, Mariner had been digging through her memories for any hint that Bradward Boimler might have felt something more for her than friendship. Every touch, every casual hug, every smile, every word, became a suspect to interrogate. But nothing she could remember made his confession make sense.

I love you.

She despaired. Had Boimler felt this way all along? Had he been pining silently beside her, wishing for something more? Mooning over her in private, while putting up the facade of a faithful, reluctant sidekick? Not that he would ever admit to being her sidekick in the first place. Could she have accidentally insinuated that they might become something more in the future? 

I love you.

She seethed. Was their entire friendship just some elaborate ploy to get in her pants? Mariner knew the type too well. They used the transitory life in Starfleet as an excuse to love-and-leave. Pretending to get close, getting what they wanted, and then ghosting the relationship, too often by transfer. Boimler was always looking for that next promotion on a bigger ship. Maybe he was hoping for a little something extra from Mariner before he left again.

I love you.

She sighed. Mariner knew that Boimler felt genuine friendship for her, and she, for him. They had gone through too many close scrapes for her to simply chuck her faith in him out the nearest airlock. What they had was real. But the question remained: what did he think they had? And did it match what she thought they had?

She stopped outside of her quarters, suddenly realizing that her biometrics weren’t opening the door. She tried it twice more, receiving a bleep of rejection each time, before she realized that she had gone to the wrong quarters entirely, and was standing outside of Rutherford’s and Boimler’s shared quarters instead.

Mariner stood there, mulling over her mistake, refusing to believe it hadn’t been a mistake in the first place. “Screw it,” she muttered, and called upon Lieutenant Locke.

Starfleet vessels were honeycombed with restricted spaces: equipment lockers, or closets, or maintenance accessways to high-priority systems. Junior officers often needed access to these places for routine work, which would normally be authorized by their supervising officer. Except, supervising officers could be forgetful, and often neglected to add authorizations to their work orders. These same supervisors also liked to chew out junior officers who asked too many questions, or took too long getting a job done because they had to ask yet another officer for permission to access what needed to be fixed or retrieved. 

And so, some industrious junior officer with a laissez faire interpretation of regulations would invariably create in the system a supervisor who didn’t exist. This imaginary officer, never of a higher rank than a full lieutenant, would be put into the ship’s network—by the officer directly, if they happened to work in Security, or by a friend who worked in Security—and granted an access code that could open any troublesome doors keeping diligent junior officers from completing their work. 

Ensigns would catch each other taking advantage of the convenient access codes, and the practice spread through word-of-mouth. Need something from a restricted samples cabinet? Ask Lieutenant Locke. Need to triple-check the restricted EPS conduits on the dorsal phaser emitters before tomorrow’s combat drill? Lieutenant Locke can help. Mariner had seen the imaginary officer literally entered as “Lieutenant Locke” aboard several different vessels, but the name could vary from ship to ship.

By unspoken agreement, those in the know never used the access code for anything important or dangerous. Access logs for certain high-level systems or senior officer quarters might get scrutinized, and would blow the entire scheme. Sometimes the phantom officers were discovered anyway, and purged. A stern warning not to violate security procedures would circulate throughout the lower decks. But after the heat died down, Lieutenant Locke always came back, usually with a new name.

Every ship Mariner had served aboard, and possibly every ship in the fleet, had a Lieutenant Locke. Mariner had learned of the Cerritos’s Lieutenant Locke on her first day aboard the ship, and had felt relieved that she wouldn’t need to create her own. Someone accessing the quarters of a couple of junior lieutenants wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. She punched in the access code, and the doors slid apart.

She had been in their quarters before, but never without one of them actually present. Her footsteps practically thundered in the quiet of the empty room. Immediately, it felt wrong to be there. But as the doors slid shut behind her, she made no move to leave.

Each occupant haunted the room in different ways, and it was easy for Mariner to distinguish between them. Rutherford’s projects covered the far table by the window, with loose components scattered around a circuit board. Smudges of grease and soot marked the top bunk in the wall as his, probably remnants of when he’d reluctantly abandoned a project mid-tinkering to satisfy his body’s inconvenient need for sleep.

Boimler’s presence was less industrious. For someone who yearned so hard to be taken seriously, he had hoarded a trove of childish totems. Plastic figurines of famous captains lined a shelf in the center of the wall, a shrine to the men of history who he desperately wanted to be. His recruitment poster of Una Chin-Riley hung in his bottom bunk, declaring Ad Astra Per Aspera!

Hardship had certainly found Boimler. Transporter-cloned, then demoted from the Titan. Forced to mourn his own death when said transporter clone died in a freak accident mere months later. Killed on Corazonia, albeit revived a few minutes later. Flash-fried on the Nautilus …

I love you.

In a fit of pique, Mariner twisted all of the heads of the figurines on the shelf to face the wrong way. Just the thought of anyone touching his precious figures would probably send Boimler into hysterics. It made her feel better to imagine him huffily twisting their heads back in place and then carefully, exactingly posing the figures the way he’d had them before. 

Sighing, she collapsed into the empty bottom bunk and rolled her boots up onto the clean bedcover. She kicked a black streak into the bulkhead for good measure, careful to avoid his poster. Leaving a mess would annoy him, but harming Una would cross a line.

As she sighed again, she felt her chest untightening for what felt like the first time that day. Like a bowstring being slowly undrawn, her body relaxed, and she sank into the cushion, staring up at the dented bunk ceiling.

It smells like him, she realized: lavender-scented mousse, and a complementary floral cologne he had programmed and replicated himself, which he called Eau de Riker Number Four, a name for which Mariner had teased him mercilessly. Now that oh-so-mock-able scent made his bunk feel warm and soothing.

What the actual fuck was going on with her? Mariner had lost friends many times before, and had nearly lost friends even more times than that. Had Ransom been right, and this was hitting her differently because she had been in command? 

It didn’t feel like it. It felt like something else. Something impossible. Something she still fervently wanted to remain unexamined.

The doors opened again, and she heard a pair of boots stop with surprise in the doorway. “Oh! Uh, hi, Mariner!” Rutherford greeted her. His mismatched eyes did a quick sweep of the room as if to confirm that he had walked into the correct set of quarters.

“What up, Rutherford?” Mariner grunted. 

Instantly adjusting to her presence, Rutherford left the doorway and went straight to his work table. His hands were working before he even sat down, prodding at the unfinished circuit board with a pair of tools. The faint odor of smoke soon joined Boimler’s scent in the bunk.

She loved Rutherford’s ability to simply roll with whatever happened without question. Loved him for it, and envied it. “Nothing else going on tonight?” she asked.

“Nah, Tendi is busy studying the Science Officer Training Manual with T'Lyn. I couldn’t find you at the bar, so I figured I’d log some project time. And here you are!” It was several more seconds of silent soldering before Rutherford thought to ask, “Uh, did you want to hang out? We could go do something.”

Mariner waved a hand at the offer. “You keep doing you, Ruthie. I’m just…”

Thinking? Ruminating? Wallowing?

Ugh. Pining?

“Rough day today, huh?” he said, not making the words into an actual question.

“Yeah. Got chewed out by Ransom,” Mariner groused. “He got on my case about a few little accidents today.”

“Yeah, Sri’lak mentioned that you almost ‘bumped’ into her with a shuttle,” Rutherford admitted. “You might want to steer clear of her for a while. Pun not intended.”

“He stuck me on Cargo Bay Five! Can you believe it?” said Mariner.

You’re such a lying piece of shit, she thought to herself. 

Rutherford made an apologetic face. “Man, that’s rough. The other engineers and I, we… Heh. We do not treat that place kindly. Sorry in advance,” he said, sounding not too terribly apologetic.

“Yeah, well…” What could she tell him? That Ransom had to bench her from the real work because she couldn’t keep it together? That he’d taken pity on her after she’d begged him for scutwork? “Just more crap falling down the ladder,” she sighed.

“That’s how you determine ‘down’ relative to your position in space,” Rutherford agreed, reciting the old Academy joke. “Find a ladder and look which way the crap falls.”

She listened to his tinkering in silence, luxuriating in the peacefulness of the borrowed bunk. The gentle white noise and the becalming scent were almost enough to lull her to sleep. Rutherford wouldn’t even think twice if you asked to spend the night in this bunk, she couldn’t help but think to herself. You might actually get a good night’s sleep if you did.

The thought made her snort with laughter. “What the hell happened to us, Rutherford? We used to be the big kings of Beta Shift. And now look at us,” she mused, “stuck in quarters because our nerds are otherwise occupied.”

“Huh?” said Rutherford, distracted.

“You know, our nerds. Tendi is yours, and mine is B-uhh…and then, also Boimler,” she said. “You and me, we used to be a hard-drinking, hard-partying duo, and now we’re just…sad.”

Now Rutherford snorted, and resumed his soldering. “Is that how you remember us? A ‘hard-partying duo?’”

She propped herself up on one elbow to give him a puzzled look. “Uh, yeah?”

Chortling, Rutherford said, “I mean, we were on the same shift. And we were both at the bar plenty of times. But we didn’t really do much together back then. We were just sort of there at the same time, and you tend to kind of ‘hold court’ when you’ve got a few drinks in you.”

Mariner frowned, plumbing the depths of her memory. Her tendency to get blackout drunk more often back then made the details hazy, but surely Rutherford had the wrong of it. She remembered nights in the ship’s lounge, laughing with him, telling stories with him, teaching the younger officers all of the dirty jokes she had learned on her previous ships…

Or, well, no. She had done all of that, and Rutherford had been there, listening in whenever she grew loud enough to drown out the rest of the room. They had spoken a few times, but always as part of a larger group conversation. 

Surely, though, that had just been the start of things. After all, he’d told her about that big date with Ensign Barnes…

No. She had overheard him talking about the upcoming date with Barnes to a group of engineers, and she had invited herself into the conversation. 

It hadn’t been until Tendi’s arrival had brought them all together that the four of them had become inseparable. 

“Wow. I guess you’re right,” she admitted, emerging from her reverie with a shrunken voice. “Sorry, man.”

“What? No!” he laughed. “Don’t be sorry. It’s actually kind of sweet. Like, our friendship impacted you so powerfully, it rippled outward from the inflection point and propagated into the past, making you remember us as better friends back then!”

Now Mariner laughed with him. “‘ The Temporal Mechanics of Friendship.’ Now there’s a paper that would get you laughed out of the Daystrom Institute,” she said. “I guess Tendi really did change everything, didn’t she?”

“Well, you and me, sure,” Rutherford agreed. “But you and Boimler were always tight.”

She frowned. “What are you talking about?” she said.

“You and Boimler,” Rutherford repeated. He looked up from his project and saw her confusion. “Oh, come on. You know. ‘Mariner and Boimler.’ People practically can’t say one name without the other.”

“What? No! You’re thinking of ‘Tendi and Rutherford,’” Mariner insisted, swinging her feet out from the bunk to sit at the edge. “Since when was it ‘Mariner and Boimler?’”

“Uhh, since he got assigned to the Cerritos ? You two were practically joined at the hip from the moment Boims came aboard. You made him your cha’Dich.”

Mariner insisted, “That was the night Tendi came aboard. We already agreed that Tendi is the secret sauce in our friend group, so it doesn’t count.”

“Didn’t you say you used to swap assignments with other ensigns so you’d end up on Boimler’s jobs?” Rutherford noted, scratching his head.

With a frustrated puff, Mariner said, “That’s just because I knew he would do most of the work.”

“And all of the pranks,” continued Rutherford. “Like when you rigged the replicator to include itching powder in his new uniforms. Or that time you programmed yourself into his holonovel.”

Mariner laughed. “Oh, man, I forgot about that one. He wanted to play Dixon Hill because he heard that Jean-Luc Picard used to run the program, and he thought it would make him more ‘captainly.’ So I sliced into the file and subbed my physical parameters into every NPC in the program so they would all look and sound like me!”

“Yeah,” drawled Rutherford. “He said a femme fatale that looked just like you wearing a slinky dress walked into his office, promising to do ‘anything’ if he would help catch her husband’s killer. He actually thought it was you until he freaked out and ended the program.” He raised an eyebrow, looking at her expectantly.

Sputtering, Mariner said, “I didn’t know that would be the first character he met in the holonovel! They all looked like me! If anything, that makes Boims the creep for running a horny program.”

“It’s the holodeck. Like, ninety percent of the programs are horny,” Rutherford said. “Also, I never said ‘creep,’ so…”

Groaning, Mariner crossed her arms and grumbled, “Whatever, man. Now who’s retroactively propagating relationships?”

Rutherford’s cybernetic eye blinked with a solid white screen as he said, “Oh, wait! I found the clip I was looking for. Hang on.”

A cold stab of worry lanced up through Mariner’s stomach. “Clip?” she echoed warily.

“Yeah, it’s from Boimler’s first night on the ship!” said Rutherford. He set his gaze on the LCARS display at the far wall, behind the row of action figures with twisted heads, and grimaced. 

“I, uh, thought you lost all your memories from before that Pakled incident with the Titan,” Mariner said warily.

“A lot of it, yeah. But the gap only started a few weeks before Tendi came aboard. I still have memories from before that,” he explained. Grunting, straining, Rutherford heaved mightily, clenching his fists and screwing his eyes shut. “Come on… Come on… Gah!”

The screen blinked to life with an image of the Cerritos’s lounge. Mariner recognized the perspective, taken as if sitting in one of the booths by the window. Rutherford’s hands sat on the table at the bottom of the frame, demarcating it as his perspective, and across from him sat three fresh-faced arrivals to the ship. Big Merp loomed at the far edge of the booth, his massive frame half-hanging out of the too-small seat. At the window, Ensign Castro sat, still wearing her black and gray uniform from her brief stint aboard the Enterprise. And sandwiched between them, fresh-faced and still sporting his Academy haircut, was Ensign Bradward Boimler. 

“Why did you have to strain that hard to get it on the screen? You sounded like you were taking a shit,” Mariner said, confused.

“Shh! Just watch!” Rutherford insisted.

“We really appreciate you guys showing us around,” Big Merp’s recording said, lifting his glass of synthale. “The ship’s a lot bigger on the inside than it looks. I don’t know how you engineers managed that one,” he added, laughing.

Smugly, the Castro onscreen lifted her glass as well. “It’s a bit smaller than what I’m used to, but it seems like a decent ship.”

“Ugh. Castro,” Mariner gagged. 

With his elbows mashed tight against his ribs by virtue of riding in the middle seat, Boimler awkwardly lifted his synthale. “Well, I’m just excited to be here,” he said. “A real starship, and not just a training cruise? This is a dream come—”

“Heeeeeeeeeeeeeyy!”

Mariner winced at the sound of her own voice coming from offscreen. As she watched, Rutherford’s memory of her staggered into frame. Her jacket was unbuttoned and rumpled, with only a single sleeve rolled up to the elbow. A half-empty bottle of something most definitely not ship-issued synthehol dangled in her fist as she draped herself onto Big Murp’s shoulder to keep upright.

“Is this the fresh meat? Have you told them what happened to the last batch of newbies? Not enough left of them to fill a single torpedo, if you know what I mean,” belched the memory Mariner. Her gaze traveled up the long, wide span of Big Murp. “Shit, look at this slab of beef! We’re gonna need two torpedoes to launch his dead ass, minimum.”

As she endured the memory of Big Murp squirming under her drunken attention, Mariner cringed. The half-empty bottle in her hand explained why she didn’t remember that night in any real detail, but she recognized that particular era of her career: freshly demoted and transferred from the Quito, on her absolutely last chance in Starfleet, serving on her mother’s ship and resenting every minute of it. Before the Cerritos had become her home, it had been her punishment.

“Excuse me,” Boimler said, “but is that real alcohol? Because that’s a controlled substance aboard starships.”

Past Mariner squinted in disbelief, and her eyes strained to focus on the source of the noise. As the present Mariner watched, a look of sly delight blossomed in her past self’s face. Mariner had never seen that exact expression staring back at her in the mirror before, but she knew the thought behind it immediately: Oh, you? You are gonna be fun, is what that look said.

The memory Mariner took a long swig from her bottle, then ducked into the booth, sliding across a surprised and uncomfortable Big Murp’s lap and cramming Castro further into the corner to deposit herself next to Boimler. Big Murp took the hint and stumbled out of the booth seat entirely, while Castro had to awkwardly climb over the back of her seat and pull herself into the next booth behind them, all while glaring at the drunken Mariner. 

Oblivious to the fallout from her entrance, Mariner slung her arm around Boimler’s to keep him from recoiling back in horror. “Listen here, you…uh…wassyur name?” she slurred, and poked his chest with the neck of her bottle.

“B-Boimler. Brad Boimler,” he answered. 

“Listen here, Bad Broimler: across all the infinite cosmos, in every intelligent species we’ve ever encount’r’d, there is one unifying concept that transcends langu’ge ‘n’ culture,” she lectured him, sweeping a hand out at the starfield in the window. “And that concept is: bein’ a narc.”

He stiffened, trying and failing to shrug her arm off his shoulder. “I’m not ‘being a narc,’ I’m just citing procedure!” he huffed.

“Naarrrrrrcc,” Mariner belched in reply. “Broiler, what’s the numb’r one rule ‘n Starfleet?”

“Well,” he said, frowning, “Admiral Picard teaches us that the first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, be it scientific, or historical, or—”

“Bzzzzt,” Mariner buzzed, and tapped his nose with the bottle’s damp mouth. “The rule is: Starfleet watches out f’r Starfleet. Space is big, man. It wants t’ kill you. And pretty much everyth’ng that lives ‘n space wants t’ kill you too. All we’ve got out here is each other.”

The nervous new Ensign Boimler looked directly down the camera. Mariner realized he was looking to Rutherford for confirmation. The entire frame bobbed as past Rutherford nodded in agreement.

“And sure,” past Mariner grunted, “sometim’s that means puttin’ boot to ass if some’ne does someth’ng stupid, like get his friend killed in a stunt chasin’ a stupid Academy legacy no one will care about—”

“Uhhh,” Boimler drawled, confused.

“—but it also means cover’ng for other people when they make an honest mistake, or bend the rules a li’l’. Because they’re there t’ do that for you too,” Mariner finished, sweeping dramatically with the bottle.

The fresh-faced Boimler hesitated. Finally, tilting his head in consideration, he admitted, “Well, it’s not like I’m your commanding officer. I guess I don’t need to—”

“Heyy, that’s my guy!” Mariner crowed. In one motion, she snatched the synthale from his glass and tilted it back, taking the full pint in three quick swallows. Then she smacked the empty glass back onto the table and tipped her bottle into it, filling it with a steaming blue liquid. “Stick with me, Boiler, and I’ll show you th’ ropes. You’ll be a real Starfleet boy in no time, if ‘n away mission doesn’t kill you first!”

“I’m sorry, but…who are you?” Boimler said.

But Mariner had already forgotten him, dropping her chin to her chest. “Shit. My combadge fell off. One sec, gotta go find it.”

And she slid bonelessly out of her seat, landing somewhere under the table with a thud.

Boimler looked at the camera—at Rutherford—once more. “Well, I won’t report her—”

From somewhere below the frame, Mariner called, “S’all good. Still wearin’ it. Forgot which boob it was on.”

“—but I am definitely not drinking whatever this is,” Boimler declared, and pushed the smoky blue glass across the table.

As the screen went dark, Rutherford burst into peals of laughter. “You made him drink the whole thing!” he giggled. “He showed up to his first shift dead on his feet!”

Mariner stewed in the memory, unable to find any humor in it. “That…is not how I remember it going,” she admitted, and frowned.

“That’s the curse of objective memory. The meat forgets, but the metal can’t. Until someone rips this one out of me too,” Rutherford said, smiling as he tapped his implant. But as he watched Mariner, his expression sobered, and he leaned forward earnestly. “Hey, it’s okay. I mean, you stuck with him that first duty shift, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Mariner admitted. “I covered for him whenever he went to puke his guts out. Which was more than once.”

“‘Starfleet watching out for Starfleet,’ just like you said,” Rutherford said, grinning. 

She didn’t answer, letting her eyes fall to the carpet. Her rough treatment of Newbie Boimler wasn’t the issue. Maybe she hadn’t been overly kind, but making the new guy hungover for his first day on the job was another universal concept that transcended language and culture. The real problem was the person she had been back then.

She had been so fucking angry. Angry at Starfleet, angry at her parents, angry at the universe, and furious with herself. Nothing she did was good enough for anyone, least of all her. So she drank, and fucked around, waiting for her mother to get sick of her and finally, finally, kick her out of the fleet for good, making her utter failure complete. It was inevitable, and everyone knew it.

And as she thought about that night, that moment, she realized that meeting Boimler had changed all of that, just a little.

This uptight little prick. This stuffy, huffy, pompous little weasel with delusions of getting a captaincy. Seeing him felt like looking at herself in her own Academy days

After that night in the bar, Mariner wasn’t just marking time until her dishonorable discharge. She had a plaything to tease and prank. She had a friend who could make her laugh. She had an example to follow that made her give half a shit about her job again.

It hadn’t happened all at once. Slowly, like the world’s fussiest iceberg, Bradward Boimler had drifted into her life. And just like an iceberg, his presence went much, much deeper than she’d realized.

“Mariner? You okay?”

Rutherford’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts. She rose from Boimler’s bunk, stretching theatrically with a long groan. “Well, I should get to my own quarters. Got a long day of cleaning up after you engineering nerds ahead of me. G’night, Rutherford.”

“Night, Mariner,” he said, smiling at her before diving back into his circuit board.

She started for the door, but then paused. “Hey, um… Thanks for being cool about the, you know, breaking and entering,” she said sheepishly.

“Pfft. You’re Mariner,” Rutherford said, waving off her chagrin. “Since when can anyone stop you from going where you want?”

A smile crept into her face. “Yeah…” she agreed.

 

---

 

Even at Oh-Two-Hundred Hours, sickbay didn’t sleep. A steady buzz of activity worked between biobeds and at lab stations, manned by the unfamiliar faces of Delta Shift. Most of the crew present wore the Medical Division blue uniform, but a few officers in reds and golds lingered, seeking treatment for whatever bumps and scrapes they had suffered.

One big difference between the day and night shifts, however, were the pointed lack of surgeries being conducted. Those were kept largely to Alpha and Beta Shifts, when the ship’s more senior officers did their best work. In the dead of night, the surgical alcove stood empty, save for its one patient.

Mariner strode across sickbay as though she owned the place. A freshly replicated set of maroon surgical scrubs covered her uniform, complete with a mask and a cap that strained against her thick curls. Normally, a crewperson couldn’t simply replicate any uniform they wanted, but Lieutenant Locke’s clearance codes had helped Mariner obtain a disguise that could ferry her behind enemy lines.

She hesitated at the edge of the privacy curtain, which still shone in a glowing wall around the alcove. The sound dampeners hummed, blocking any noise from passing through the holographic curtain. On the other side, Boimler lay recovering between surgeries, fighting for his life. He remained in a medically induced coma, gone from the world in every meaningful way. 

He’d never know she visited. He couldn’t say or do anything for her. 

So why did she want this so badly?

“Just go,” she murmured to herself, her voice muffled by the surgical mask.

With a deep breath, she stepped forward, pushing through the hologram. But as her hands passed through the curtain ahead of her, an iron grip closed around her arm and dragged her backwards before she could cross through it. 

She stumbled, falling onto one knee, and looked up to find a furious Doctor T’Ana looming above her. “Excuse me, doctor,” T’Ana said through gritted fangs, “I need a consultation in my office. Right this way.”

That iron grip hoisted Mariner off the floor and towed her across sickbay. “Ow, ow, ow! Claws! Claws!” Mariner cried as needlepoints dug into her arm.

T’Ana all but threw Mariner through the doors of her private office, then stormed after her and pressed the controls to lock the doors and polarize the window. The view of sickbay turned into a black mirror of the office, with T’Ana’s anger flashing bright yellow against the darkness.

“You really are too stupid for your own good, aren’t you?” T’Ana snarled, and stomped around the desk to throw herself into her chair. Three or four PADDs sat spread out before her, and next to them, an open bottle and a half-filled tumbler of some pungent blue liquid. “Sit down,” she ordered, pointing to the chair opposite her desk.

Mariner glared, ripping the mask down from her face. “I didn’t—”

“Sit. Down,” T’Ana said, turning each word into a deadly threat.

She did, though not before waiting a long moment, just to prove that T’Ana wasn’t the boss of her. It wasn’t easy to make her way through the small office. Stacks of crates took up most of the floor space, surrounding a small cart that was filled with rows and rows of silvery metallic canisters.

The Caitian matched Mariner, glare for glare, sparing only a moment to drain the tumbler in front of her with one quick swallow. Thumping the glass onto her desktop, she said, “Impersonating medical staff. Contaminating an active surgery. Violating patient rights. With that stunt you just pulled, we aren’t talking about a stint in the brig. I could have you court-martialed. And even mommy and daddy couldn’t keep you out of the penal colony this time.”

“So do it,” Mariner challenged her.

T’Ana hissed at Mariner, baring her yellowed fangs. Her eyes smoldered, her pupils little more than slits as they carved into Mariner, who tried to glare back without blinking. The smell of whatever T’Ana was drinking burned in her eyes.

Finally, T’Ana groaned and dug into a desk drawer, coming back with a second tumbler. She slammed the glass in front of Mariner, then filled both tumblers from the bottle. “Drink,” she commanded, and lifted her own glass, offering Mariner sarcastic cheers.

Mariner rolled her eyes and emptied the glass. “Why are—OH, GOD.” She coughed as the blue liquid traced a line of fire straight down her throat and pooled in her belly like a magma pocket. The aftertaste established a beachhead on her tongue, digging in and refusing to leave, possibly forever. “What is this stuff?” Mariner gagged.

“Not sure. I bought it off a Denobulan trader back on Starbase Twelve,” T’Ana said, and refilled both of their glasses. “There’s a real chance it might actually be disinfectant.”

“If I go blind, you’re the one who has to fix it,” Mariner told her. She tackled her second glass with more cautious, tiny sips.

Sighing, T’Ana leaned back in her chair and cradled her glass. “So what’s the deal, kid? Was today the day you just decided to go for the ‘Fuck Around And Find Out’ gold medal?”

“I just wanted to see my friend,” Mariner snapped.

“Yeah, no shit. But why?” T’Ana demanded. “Your friend is a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on my table. His brain is completely dark under that cerebral inhibitor. So why the itch to see him?”

“I…” Mariner sank back in her chair. She took a slow sip, letting the drink burn a long, winding trail down to her stomach. “I had a bad day,” Mariner admitted. “And whenever I have a bad day, Boimler’s the one who cheers me up. We play a dumb game, or goof around in the holodeck, or go drinking at the bar.”

“That ain’t happening anytime soon,” T’Ana noted dryly.

“Duh. And I know that,” Mariner said, tapping the side of her head. “But even still, I thought I’d feel better if I just saw him. It’s stupid,” she grumbled.

As Mariner nursed her drink, T’Ana gave her a long, searching look, as if coming to a decision. “Do you know why I won’t let you in there to see him?” asked T’Ana.

Mariner smirked. “Because cats are territorial creatures?”

“Watch it!” T’Ana growled, jabbing a claw at Mariner. “The reason I won’t let you back there is because right now, that’s not your friend on the table. It’s not even most of him.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mariner said, rolling her eyes. She wasn’t a wide-eyed cadet coming back from her first away mission. “You completed removal of the necrotized tissue. Big whoop.”

T’Ana’s eyes narrowed. “That,” she said slowly, “is a surprisingly specific way to phrase it coming from someone who doesn’t work in sickbay.”

Too late, Mariner realized that she’d accidentally quoted the last status update in the sickbay logs she wasn’t supposed to be able to see. “I picked up a lot from Tendi,” she said, and slurped noisily at her drink.

“Uh-huh,” said T’Ana, clearly unconvinced.

“Whatever. I was on the shuttle that brought him in, remember? I know how bad he was hurt,” Mariner retorted.

T’Ana stared, watching Mariner fidget in her seat in silence. It was several moments more before she said in a low voice, “You saw enough of him there on the shuttle that you could still recognize him. If you walk back there now, that’s not what you’re gonna see.”

“What are you talking about?” Mariner said.

“I just spent sixteen hours scraping the charcoal out of Boimler. I’d still be at it, but I’m legally required to get at least four hours of sleep before I’m allowed to touch him again,” T’Ana said.

“So?” shot Mariner.

“So what do you think is left, dipshit?” T’Ana snapped.

Mariner’s mind unwillingly summoned the image of Boimler on the shuttle compartment deck, with any real recognizable feature scorched away, save for a wheezing mouth that tried over and over to scream, but couldn’t make a sound. Slowly, painfully, Mariner tried to mentally remove all of the blackened portions of Boimler. 

What little remained made her stomach twist into fiery knots.

T’Ana nodded at the realization dawning in Mariner’s face. “The cloning vats are working overtime right now. One new femur. New tibias and fibulas. Feet and toes to match. All new arms, starting at the shoulders-down. A whole new mandible, with teeth to go with it. Twenty-five kilos of muscle fiber we’ll need to shape as we go. Do you wanna see his new eyes? It’s kinda neat how they bob in the nutrient bath like ice cubes.” She glanced down at her room-temperature tumbler with a passing look of disappointment.

Mariner swallowed hard, fighting against the bile rising in her throat.

“And of course, all the new stuff we can’t just grow is here too,” T’Ana continued, waving a hand at the stacks of crates that made the office so much tinier than usual. Pointing to each crate in turn, T’Ana noted, “New kidneys. New lungs. Half a digestive tract. Gonna be a bitch to cultivate a new gut flora inside of him from scratch. And of course, we have about twenty gallons of synthiderm to wallpaper over all of it.” And she motioned to the dozens of silver canisters on the carts.

With each new item T’Ana listed, the Boimler in Mariner’s imagination lost another piece. She screwed her eyes shut, trying to banish the image, but could not.

“He’s not injured back there, Mariner,” T’Ana said in a low voice. “He’s fucking disassembled. If I let you walk back there now, you’ll see his heart beating inside his open fucking chest.”

“Yeah,” Mariner said shakily. “I…yeah. Okay.” She tried to drink, but her hands trembled, forcing her to clutch the glass as tightly as she could.

T’Ana nodded, and her hard glare relaxed. Sagging into her chair, she said, “It’s easy when you don’t give a shit. They train all of us for that at the Academy. ‘Professional distance.’ It isn’t until you’re actually sailing the black that you realize how much bullshit it all is. You need somebody to care about out here, or you’ll lose your goddamn mind.”

“It’s not like that between us,” Mariner said quickly. “Bradward Boimler is what would happen if Noonian Soong tried to create the universe’s fussiest android.”

Snorting, T’Ana eyed Mariner over the top of her tumbler. Her words echoed into her drink as she said, “Is that why you’ve been up my ass trying to see him all day?”

“I… Shut up,” Mariner grumbled into her own drink.

“Tell yourself whatever you like, Mariner. But I know this place is just a little bit easier to handle when you have someone aboard who gives half a shit about you,” said T’Ana.

Mariner nodded numbly. Her mouth wandered aloud while her mind sluggishly worked to keep up. “Or when you at least have a Bajoran beefsteak to snag in your ‘coital hooks,’” she quipped.

Eyes narrowing, T’Ana searched for any signs of mockery in Mariner’s tone. The Caitian doctor was legendary among the crew for bragging openly and in excruciating detail about the bed she shared with the ship’s tactical officer, Shaxs, and just as legendary for keeping tight-lipped about every other aspect of their relationship. 

Satisfied that Mariner wouldn’t take the comment further, T’Ana nodded, and continued, “If you see him the way he is now, that’s all you’ll ever think about every time you look at him. And if he doesn’t pull through, it’ll be worse. If we do all this work, and his brain doesn’t come back when we turn off that inhibitor, then you don’t want to remember him the way he is now.”

Swallowing hard, Mariner nodded again. “Must be hard,” she murmured, “whenever Shaxs gets hurt on the job. Do you treat him yourself, or ‘kick him to the nearest snot-nosed ensign?’”

T’Ana sagged in her chair, looking even more exhausted. “That’s my job.” A spark of mischief lit her eye, and T’Ana added, “Now ask me how I sleep at night.”

“How—” Mariner began.

Tilting back, T’Ana drained her glass, and then plonked it onto the desktop. “Ahh. That’s how,” she sighed. “Now finish your drink and go to bed. Tomorrow ain’t gonna be any better.”

“Yeah,” Mariner agreed, and set her drink un-finished on the desk. It went against her sense of pride to leave alcohol behind, but she could make an exception for Denobulan disinfectant.

With a second glance, T’Ana added, “Leave the scrubs here. And don’t come back to sickbay until I say so. Understood?”

As Mariner struggled with the zipper at the back of her scrubs, she smirked weakly. “Right, I get it,” she said. “You’ll stop me.”

T’Ana’s cold voice froze Mariner mid-zip. “No, kid. Next time, I won’t.”

Mariner struggled to find the zipper again with shaking hands.

Chapter 4: Candles, Feelings, and the Junk Drawer

Summary:

Tendi orchestrates a daring rescue of Mariner from the clutches of Cargo Bay Five!

Mariner’s Personal Log, Stardate: Uhhh… Oh, whatever, These things are timestamped. You can see what the stupid date is.

I swear to God, I am going to kill every engineer on the Cerritos. And when they take me to trial, my sole defense will be a holo of Cargo Bay Five. No tribunal in the galaxy will convict me. If you’re listening to this because I died in the attempt, then know that my cause was just. 

And if you’re an engineer listening to this, and wondering why all your friends are gone: PICK UP AFTER YOURSELF.

 

---

 

“Hey. Hey! I see you over there, Ramirez! Close that crate and put it back if you’re done with it!” Mariner’s voice boomed off of the cavernous bulkheads as she hustled between rows of equipment crates, waving her PADD like a battle axe.

The crewman in question, Ramirez, ducked his head shamefully as he placed the last of a stack of square gray plates onto his hovercart. The crate from which he had procured those plates sat askew on a stack of mismatched boxes, its cover still open and its contents shuffled. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” Ramirez cringed, and heaved his cart into motion. “I have to get these up to Deck Three. The gravity in the Captain’s quarters failed on her mid-shower, and she’s spitting hot plasma about it.”

“You can’t just… You—! Damn it!” Mariner groaned, watching the scurrying crewman vanish out the doors. She stood at this latest mess, hardly able to distinguish it from the other open, half-empty crates stacked to either side of it. “That gravity plate failure sounds funny as hell, too, and I can’t even enjoy it down here,” she grumbled.

After two days of cleaning up Cargo Bay Five, the junk drawer of the Cerritos, Mariner looked around and saw no progress. Two days, working double shifts, moving crates back and forth, repacking half-strewn contents into one crate, only then to discover that they belonged in a different crate, then unpacking the first crate and trying to make their contents fit in to the second crate, only to then discover that it all belonged in a third crate clear on the other side of the bay…

Every few minutes, the cargo bay doors would whunge open, and a new problem would enter. An engineer, sometimes two, wandered into the bay for some small component they needed. They would weave through the haphazard rows of stacks, dig through a case to find what they needed, and then whunge through the doors again, all usually before Mariner could even find them and yell at them to put everything back where they found it. Or worse, an engineer would bring a hovercart filled with new crates of freshly replicated components to refill the stock, and Mariner would be the one to arrange where they went. Which meant somehow fitting more new crates into available space that didn’t exist.

And it was a mystery how all of the engineers coming and going could find anything in the bay. When she’d looked up the bay layout in the Cerritos’s databanks, she’d found three different unfinished diagrams for how the equipment was meant to be stored, completed by three different chief engineers throughout their respective tenures aboard the ship. As near as she could figure, Cargo Bay Five was now a strange alchemy of all three plans: some components were in two different spots, and other components were in three different spots, and still others seemed to be nowhere at all in the bay. It felt to Mariner as though she were standing in a physicalized realization of an argument about organizational style being had by three engineers across the span of the Cerritos’s entire operational life.

She plunged into the open crate of gravity plating, trying to re-stack the plates so she could at least close the lid. Fresh lubricant streaked her forearms, cut with bands of sweat that soaked her uniform and swamped her forehead. When at last the crate lid sealed, she groaned and swept her arm across her face, doing little except to spread the mess slightly more evenly across her exhausted features.

Of course, no one was making her work double shifts. No one was forcing her to work at all, except for herself. Because however much she hated, hated, hated Cargo Bay Five, it easily beat the alternative of sitting in her quarters and watching sickbay’s logs update on her PADD.

Two days. Ten surgeries. All successful, in that the machines keeping Bradward Boimler alive were still doing just that. The cognitive inhibitor remained in place, with no guarantee that anything of Boimler would remain when they finally turned it off. All of T’Ana’s work might simply be for giving him an open-casket funeral.

And Mariner would never get to ask him what he meant when he said I love you.

As she heaved the crate back onto its possibly proper stack, Mariner heard the bay doors whunge. She wheeled herself around and stalked toward the front of the bay. Even if she had chosen this hell for herself, she didn’t need to simply lie down and take it. Sisyphus, she decided, would not be rolling this particular boulder uphill any longer.

“Touch any one of these boxes without my say-so, and I will feed it to…you…” Mariner’s bluster dwindled when she saw which engineer had entered the bay. “Uh, sorry, Billups.”

Lieutenant Commander Andy Billups stood just beyond the whunging doors. Hands clasped behind his back, the Cerritos’s chief engineer surveyed the cargo bay with an idle curiosity. Mariner’s threat made his mustache twitch in amusement. “Mariner! No problem at all. Say, this place is looking great!”

“It is?” Mariner looked back over her shoulder. If anything the chaos of the bay seemed somehow worse than when she’d walked through it a moment before, as though the boxes were quietly following her and shuffling their positions when she wasn’t looking. 

“Absolutely! I can actually walk between the stacks now,” Billups said, and sashayed down an aisle by way of demonstration. “Don’t mind me. Just came in for a new EPS distribution node regulator. I was passing by Panel J-Two-Thirty-Seven on Deck Thirteen and heard the old regulator straining behind the panel. Thought I’d swap it since it’s on my way, and save us the maintenance call later. Good excuse for a break between meetings.”

Mariner sighed, folding her arms across a tall stack of nearby crates and letting her chin rest on her hands. “Of course it is,” she said. The only thing possibly worse than tedious maintenance would be senior staff meetings. One more reason to dread having a heavier collar than she already had.

Billups’s blond eyebrows knit together, and his mustache arced high in a tight-lipped expression. “Say, you’re looking a little rough, Mariner. Do you need a few extra hands around here? I could probably spare somebody from engineering to come up and help,” he offered.

“No,” Mariner moaned, and buried her face in her folded arms. “No more engineers!”

“Uh, copy that,” Billups said. As he moved a few crates from the stack in front of him to get at the bottom row, he kept a sideways look aimed at Mariner. “Is it maybe something else?” he asked hesitantly.

“No!” Mariner snapped. She caught herself, looking up, and said more softly, “Sorry. No, it’s nothing. I’m just…trying to stay busy.”

He nodded, busying himself in the crate as he shuffled through its components, looking for his regulator. “Boimler, eh?”

“Psh. I take it you’ve been talking to Ransom,” Mariner grunted.

He frowned, confused. “No, not really. But Ensign Barnes was on bridge duty when the Cerritos received the Nautilus’s distress call. When she mentioned what happened, Ensign Livik pulled the comm logs from the King’s Canyon. It made for quite the listening experience. Real impressive stuff you guys pulled out there,” he said earnestly.

Mariner groaned and buried her face in her arms again, hiding the hot embarrassment in her cheeks. “Livik!” she growled into the crate lid. “Augh! So, I guess everybody’s heard, huh?” she moaned.

Through the gap in her arms, she saw Billups shrug. “It’s a small ship. I know it might not mean much right now, but everyone in engineering is keeping their hopes up for him. Gotta admit, I didn’t even know you two were seeing each other.”

Her frustrated voice bounced off the walls, filling the cargo bay as Mariner threw her head back and yelled, “Would everyone please stop treating me like a fucking war widow? We are not dating! Bradward Boimler is a human phaser set to ‘disappointment!’”

 “Wow. Guess I, uh, misread that in the other direction,” Billup said, blinking.

A long sigh sputtered through Mariner’s lips. It galled her to think that her business was the talk of the ship, particularly when there was no actual business of which to speak. None of the fake rumors she had started about herself had spread with nearly as much speed or enthusiasm. Where were the people whispering about her being a black ops assassin, or a Mirror Universe spy, or the half-Douwd daughter of Kevin Uxbridge on the run from the last living Husnock? 

Screw it. She was already the talk of their small town in space. Why not use that to gain a little perspective? 

“Hey, Billups,” Mariner said, “do you mind if I ask you something kinda personal? …and you can bail after you hear the question if you want.”

“Oh! Uh, sure,” said Billups. 

Cautiously, Mariner began, “So, your whole deal, being a, uh…a…” 

She faltered, unsure of what exactly to call it. Voluntary celibacy? Celibacy by threat of inheriting a monarchy he didn’t want? Was there a word for that? 

But Billups stepped in, smiling good-naturedly. “Being asexual? Aromantic? ‘A’ delight to have at parties?” 

Mariner stared, blank-faced.

Coughing, Billups said, “Sorry. But yes, I get your meaning.”

“How did you figure all that biz out about yourself?” asked Mariner.

His brow creased in thought. “Well, I don’t know exactly how that ‘business’ works for anyone else, but I expect it was the same for me as it was for most people: you try things, make mistakes, and figure out what ‘business’ works for you. Only in my case, what worked was mostly ‘no business,’” he said, and shrugged.

“And nothing ever made you feel differently? Even after you figured out your ‘business?’” she asked.

“Well,” he said coyly, “there was one special lady who caught my attention. She’s about ten meters tall…”

“…I feel like you’re talking about the warp core,” drawled Mariner.

“Faithful and stalwart. Great sense of rhythm. She’s never off-tempo!”

Mariner summoned all of her strength to keep herself from rolling her eyes. “It’s the warp core,” she grunted.

“And let’s just say she really gets my engines revving,” Billups said sotto voce. 

“Please, please just say ‘warp core,’” Mariner moaned, clutching at her face.

“And her name is…the warp core,” Billups finished proudly.

“Yes! Thank you!” Mariner cried at the ceiling, throwing up her hands. “Billups, I’m talking about real people, not some tech fetish. Has any real, living, normal person ever gotten your blood pumping?”

When her gaze dropped back down, she felt a stab of guilt at the wince in Billup’s features. He shied back a step, his hands worrying in a knot as he said, “Well…no.”

“Damn it,” Mariner growled, and rubbed at her face. The long hours and lousy sleep were catching up with her quickly. “I’m sorry, Billups. That was shitty of me.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve been asked. Not by a long shot,” he admitted.

“Which is why it’s shitty. Not doing ‘business’ is just as valid a way to live as anyone who’s open for ‘business.’ And I’m an asshole for suggesting it wasn’t normal,” Mariner insisted tiredly. 

He relaxed, spreading his hands in an accepting gesture. “Thanks. ‘Normal’ is a great word to hear when you’re monitoring system status, but it doesn’t work well for people. Why don’t we say my situation is ‘atypical?’”

Mariner returned his small smile in kind. “Done. And I’d like to rephrase my question, unless you want to tell me to go jump out an airlock instead.”

He chuckled, and said, “Go for it. The asking, I mean, not the airlock.”

Smoothing away the sweaty hair plastered to her face, Mariner said, “Out of everyone on the ship, you have your ‘business’ figured out better than maybe anyone. And that’s out of what is, according to Ransom, Starfleet’s horniest and least romantically committed crew.”

Billups frowned. “How would they track something like that? By the number of HR complaints?” he asked.

“Personally, I’d look at sickbays: count the contraceptives going out and the STIs coming in,” Mariner said, and hated herself a little for how quickly she came up with that answer.

Cringing, Billups said, “Curiosity withdrawn. Please continue.”

“So, what would happen if—as a thought experiment,” she added quickly, holding up her hands, “—someone came along who made you rethink what you thought about yourself?”

His brow crinkled. “Rethink?” he echoed.

“Right. Like, you have a type of person you’re usually attracted to. Or, in your case, it’s no type at all. Or, say, a hypothetical person who has…” Mariner ran through a mental list of her past relationships, flings, crushes, fantasies, stands of one-or-more-nights, and benefiting friendships, silently ticking her fingers down at her sides. “...conservatively, fifteen different types…”

“Fifteen?” Billups exclaimed, his mustache dropping in shock. “Wowzers.”

“—and then along comes Number Sixteen,” Mariner continued. “And you’re not into them. Which is fine, because Number Sixteen isn’t into you either. No problem. Except, one day, Number Sixteen just blurts out that they actually are into you. Whips those feelings out in front of everyone.”

“Uhhh,” Billups tried to interject.

But Mariner didn’t notice. “And before you can even think of an answer, everyone else in the room is like, ‘yeah, that makes sense. I can see it.’ And so you think about it for half a second,” she said, clutching at her temples, “and you expect your answer to be ‘obviously no, dude.’ But the idea is already in there, germinating like a weed, and you just can’t shake it. And now you have to wonder if the answer really is ‘no,’ or if it’s always not been ‘no.’ Maybe it’s been ‘maybe’ all along, but you never thought about it because nobody is supposed to think of Number Sixteen like that!  How is that not supposed to drive you crazy?” she exclaimed.

“I, uh…” Billups watched her carefully as she caught her breath. She couldn’t help but notice he’d taken a full step back from her at some point during what she was coming to realize was an unhinged tirade. “I think I got lost in the middle somewhere,” he admitted.

Steadying herself with a slow, deep breath, Mariner pushed the hair back out of her face and said, “It’s fine. Forget it.”

“Well,” he hedged, “I will say this much: if I met somebody that made me feel differently than I ever did before, I’d pay attention to that feeling.”

Mariner parsed his words slowly. “So your solution to a situation driving you crazy is to just keep thinking about the situation? That is wildly unhelpful,” she deadpanned.

“Not the situation,” he insisted, “just the feeling. It doesn’t mean you have to say or do anything you don’t want. Maybe it means what you actually want isn’t what you thought you wanted. Or maybe you do want what you thought you wanted all along, and this new feeling was just you asking yourself the question.” He shrugged. “Once you’re sure of how you feel, then you can figure out what to do with that feeling. Right?”

“Huh.” Mariner steeped in the idea, running back through her last two days of frustration. If she eliminated her guilt over letting Boimler get hurt, and her confusion over his surprise confession, and the other wildly unhelpful advice and observations of their mutual friends and crewmates, what did that leave? 

“Uh, Mariner,” Billups said, wincing in apology, “I’m, ah, not Number Sixteen, am I? Because you pretty definitively established that it wasn’t Boimler. And I’m flattered, really, but—”

Closing her eyes, Mariner deadpanned, “It’s a thought experiment, Billups. I just need something to take my mind off of this cargo bay.”

“Oh, good,” he said, visibly relieved. “Well, it’s been nice chatting with you. But EPS distribution nodes don’t regulate themselves, so I’d better get this little fella installed. Thanks again for all your hard work!” And he strolled back down the rows with his new regulator in hand, whistling to himself as the cargo bay doors whunged closed behind him.

Mariner’s gaze dwindled after him, unfocused, as she ruminated on his advice. It wasn’t until her foot bumped into one of the many crates he had dislodged in his search for a new regulator that she looked down and realized the new mess of unstacked crates and open containers he had made.

“That clever son of a bitch did it right in front of me,” grumbled Mariner.

Her hands moved on autopilot, easily familiar at that point with how to tidy the cargo bay, while her mind wandered. She had spent the better part of three days trying to untangle a web of thoughts and memories, to find the root moment of where those words, I love you, might have originated in her history with Boimler. But she’d spent precious little time trying to figure out exactly what those words coming from him made her feel. And maybe that had been on purpose.

So, after she heaved the last crate into place, she sat atop it, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine what an I love you from Bradward Boimler actually did to her.

What had he said aboard the Nautilus, when they were joking about Kirk and Khan and the forbidden passions that likely never were? “ They’d probably find a nice set of empty quarters nearby. Something with a bed, maybe some candles…”

The cliche of it all made her scoff. Naturally, he would set it up in her quarters, since they couldn’t use his, unless they wanted Rutherford providing constructive criticism from the top bunk. 

She would return to her quarters after a frustrating shift, like her day in the purgatory of Cargo Bay Five, and find the lights already dimmed. A row of soft, white candles would line either side of her bed, filling the air with the scent of vanilla, or some other boring smell that didn’t trigger one of his many, many allergies.

Boimler would be waiting for her, rising from the edge of the bed, his boyish smile gleaming in the pale light. Hi, Mariner, he would say. I heard you had a rough day. I thought maybe I could do something to help you forget about it.

Like creating a fire hazard in my room? she would tease.

His face would darken with embarrassment, hardly visible in the shadows, except she knew that expression too well to ever miss it. I may have dialed back the fire suppression in your room a notch or two. By the time I got them lit, the computer put them all out at once with a forcefield, he would admit. I guess we won’t be making s’mores or crème brûlée tonight.

And she would laugh, because hey, it was a cute joke. And that would be all the opening he needed to take her by the hands, leading her gently to sit at the foot of the bed. 

As they would settle onto the mattress, she would catch a flash in his eyes, see his lips parted, feel his hand tremble oh so slightly in hers. Of course he’d be nervous. No one had been nervous with her since she’d been a teenager. She couldn’t help but grin, a little embarrassed for him.

No rose petals this time, he would say proudly. I think that shows restraint on my part.

And she would shake her head, smiling, and would try to let him down gently. This is super-cute, dude, but c’mon… she would say. I just pulled a double shift in the cargo bay. I’m disgusting. Besides, none of this is me—

Disgusting? Her imaginary Boimler interrupted her, lifting his eyebrows in mock-surprise. Hang on, let me check.

Her hand still in his, Boimler made a small circle with his thumb. Her knuckles, greasy and sweaty from the day’s hard work, crooked from years of picking fights, tingled under his soft touch. The sensation jumped through her arm, making her twitch in surprise.

He shifted his hand, pressing his fingertips into her palm. With a slow, gentle pressure, he spread her hand out against his, letting his fingertips trace their way to hers. Their fingers threaded together, their hands closing around each other, interlocking. Mariner had always imagined his touch to be clammy. Instead, it felt blazing hot, warming her all the way from her toes to her cheeks.

Nope, he said, grinning. Nothing disgusting here.

As she fumbled for a retort, his other hand drifted upward. Another soft touch jolted her, like lightning on her skin, as he brushed a sweaty curl from her forehead. He swept the hair back, circling lightly over her ear, where his hand lingered.

Looks pretty good up here. But what about…

Suddenly Mariner became painfully aware of how dark the room was. The candlelight barely reached beyond the bed. Boimler’s soft features were framed in the viewport, his fair skin glowing in the faint illumination. It almost seemed like they were the only two things in the whole universe. 

He had made himself the only other person in her universe.

Maybe candles weren’t so bad after all…

Boimler leaned forward. Mariner’s heart leapt into her throat, beating at warp speed, and she froze in a panic. At the last second, he veered from her lips. His breath brushed across her blazing cheek, tickling a line all the way back to her neck.

Here? Boimler’s whisper filled her ear, making her shiver. No. Looks good back here.

She swallowed hard, trying to push her heart back into her chest. Then a featherlight sensation pulled at her earlobe, and she gasped as his lips teased the sensitive flesh. He pulled until her earlobe popped from his mouth.

Tastes alright too, he murmured. Maybe down here?

Mariner trembled like a leaf. Somewhere, dimly, she realized that she had become the nervous one. How funny. 

But when she tried to laugh, a strangled, breathy noise emerged instead as she felt Boimler gently kiss her beneath the ear. Then again, and again. His soft lips grew bolder as he kissed a line down her neck. Mariner had to grab his shoulders to brace herself, and only then realized that he’d let go of her hand.

That freed hand moved up to her shoulder, and hooked behind the flap of her jacket. The top clasp let go with a tiny pop, and her collar fell open.

By the time his lips reached the base of her neck, his attentions had deepened. She could feel the edge of his teeth against her skin as he found a spot, the spot, her spot, just above the collarbone. All gentility vanished as he bit at her soft flesh. Her fingernails dug into the back of his uniform, and she closed her eyes, bracing her chin on his shoulder as she clutched him.

Too quickly, his lips left her body. She felt a soft pressure against her forehead, and opened her eyes to find him resting his head against hers. His lopsided grin was full of pride, and smugness, and excitement, and the promise of more.

Everything looks good to me, Boimler said, and brushed the tip of his nose against hers. But, if you want, maybe we could move to the shower instead. I bet we could find a setting in the sonic that would make you feel much, much better.

Her mouth moved, but no words came out. She could feel their breath intermingling, their mouths mere centimeters apart. She felt herself tilting, drawing closer. The heat from his body blazed like a beacon, and she pressed herself flat against his chest, reveling in his warmth.

What do you think, Mariner? She felt his whisper a hair’s breadth from her lips.

Her chin tipped up to close the distance.

“Mariner?”

She jerked, nearly toppling from her perch on the storage crate. Mariner’s eyes flew open, and she found herself still in Cargo Bay Five. Her arms wheeled to keep her from losing her balance. “Huh?” she choked.

Tendi stood before her, head tilted with confusion and concern. A cylindrical carrying case, perhaps half a meter long and a handspan wide, hung from her shoulder by its strap. She had a mass of glossy red fabric wadded up in the crook of her elbow. Mariner had never heard the doors whunging, or anyone entering, since her eyes had closed. “Are you okay?” asked Tendi.

Mariner crossed her legs and leaned forward, pasting a smile over her sweaty features. “Yep! Just…taking a break. Been working pretty hard,” Mariner said lamely.

“I can tell. You look really warm,” Tendi said, concerned. She laid the back of her hand across Mariner’s forehead, and frowned. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired!” Mariner blurted, and crushed her thighs together. “Tired. Is the only feeling. I’m having. Right now.”

Tendi’s frown lingered, but she let her hand drop. “Well, say goodbye to Cargo Bay Five. I’ve got you reassigned to my team.”

Blinking in surprise, Mariner said, “Wait. You convinced Ransom to put me back on the canal project? I appreciate it, T, but that might not—”

“Oh, we’re not working on the canals. We’re conducting a very important bit of research. Here,” said Tendi, as she pressed the wad of red fabric into Mariner’s hands. “Go put this on under your uniform and meet me in the shuttlebay. But, er, maybe first you should shower.”

“Shower?” squeaked Mariner.

Her cracking voice made Tendi squint at her with confusion. “Yeah. Get cleaned up, put that on under a fresh uniform, and meet me in the shuttlebay,” Tendi repeated.

Mariner unwadded the fabric, which separated into two pieces, revealing a sporty top and shorts of matching Command red colors. “Is this a swimsuit? What are we even researching?”

“An old human concept I just learned,” Tendi said, leaving Mariner with a wink. “It’s called ‘playing hooky.’”

 

---

 

Following a long, cold sonic shower, Mariner wandered into the shuttlebay, trying not to tug at the swimsuit hidden under her uniform. The immense bay was a hive of activity, with officers loading equipment and tools in huge stacks onto the pair of shuttles parked in the middle of the hangar. Beyond the clear force field, the planet Pacifica hung in an immense, crystal blue backdrop, with wisps of clouds drifting slowly across its span.

Tendi stood near one of the shuttles with her gear case still slung over one shoulder. A PADD rested on her hip as she bounced on her tiptoes, waving to Mariner. 

“Ready for our mission?” Tendi greeted her loudly.

Mariner frowned. “What are we—” she began to ask.

But Tendi shushed her, and whispered, “Just act natural and follow my lead.”

Usually Mariner would be leading any shenanigans, and so she found herself out of her element as she followed Tendi to the ramp of the nearest shuttle. Lieutenant Dirk stood at the foot of the ramp, checking equipment against a list he held on his PADD as junior officers pushed equipment up into the shuttle compartment, their hovercarts riding low with the sheer weight of the components being loaded.

Dirk’s bored expression tilted up from his PADD, and his high forehead wrinkled at the two of them. “What are you two doing on Alpha Shift?” he asked.

Tendi carefully smoothed her features as she held her PADD up for Dirk’s inspection. “We have orders to monitor the rear drainage channels on Site Upsilon’s slipway while they’re working on the canal. We need to hitch a ride with your next shuttle.”

“But that slipway has been raised for access. It’s already above the water, so nothing’s going to be draining out.” He lifted an eyebrow, first at the orders, and then at Mariner, who trained her expression in a mirror of Dirk’s perpetually bored look. Everyone knew her reputation, and a set of phony-sounding orders would make even the laxest supervisor think twice.

But Tendi, with her immaculate reputation in stark contrast to Mariner’s, pulled Dirk’s attention back to her with a firm nod. “We’re taking measurements on wear and tear so the engineers can get an idea of how much refurbishing they might need for the next maintenance cycle,” she said officiously. “And we’re working with delicate instrumentation, so it’s essential that we’re not disturbed. Once we finish, we’ll hop on the next shuttle coming back for resupply.”

He scrutinized Tendi’s PADD, scrolling down the page. Mariner felt sweat beading at her hairline, and she wondered if she might be taking Ransom up on that brig time after all.

Then Dirk shrugged and said, “Well, Ransom’s signed off on it, so you’re good to go. Find a spot between the crates. We lift off in ten.”

“Thanks!” Tendi beamed, taking back her PADD. “And don’t worry. I had a light breakfast this morning, so we won’t be adding any unnecessary mass to the load,” she said and patted her stomach.

But Dirk had already stopped listening, busy with checking off another load of inventory being moved into the shuttle’s rear. With barely masked glee, Tendi grabbed Mariner by the hand and led her up the ramp.

The shuttle ride down to Pacifica’s surface went much more smoothly than Mariner’s last shuttle trip. A perfectly executed landing sequence brought them down to the landing pad of Site Upsilon, in the middle of one of Pacifica’s nearly endless oceans. Through the viewport, she could see the slipway sticking up out of the smooth blue waters. Its immense, bulbous structure featured a wide opening on one side, protected by a permeable forcefield, where surface craft could enter into the planet’s crisscrossing subsurface canal system, which granted access to the far corners of the planet and its many subsurface arcologies, where the native population and their visitors dwelled.

Once the shuttle had touched down and they had disembarked, Mariner followed silently as Tendi repeated her schtick for the officer in charge of the site. “It’s imperative that we aren’t disturbed,” Tendi emphasized. “Someone wandering into the test site could contaminate our measurements. And there would be heck to pay, for sure!”

The officer in charge flapped her gills impatiently and motioned for the pair to get out of the way, too busy with the new equipment being brought through the forcefield and down into the canal elevator.

Mariner took the PADD from the officer as Tendi dragged her away from the landing pad. A low ring of ferrocrete surrounded the entirety of the slipway’s round design, dotted with small drainage channels that were designed to discharge interior water when the normally submerged structure was pushed to the surface for entering or exiting seacraft. An extended time in the sun had dried those channels and the walkway into which they were built, making for an easy stroll as the two of them circled the structure.

As they rounded the side of the structure, vanishing from eyesight of the landing pad, Mariner gaped at the PADD containing their quote-unquote orders. “Damn, Tendi! You got Ransom’s real authorization code? How drunk was he when he signed off on this bogus order?”

“You’re not the only sneakster on the ship,” Tendi said slyly. 

“Never call me a ‘sneakster’ again. But please do tell me why we’re here,” Mariner retorted.

Once they’d reached the opposite side of the structure, furthest away from any prying eyes, Tendi knelt and unlatched her carrying case. The ocean lapped at the ferrocrete edge, smooth waters that sprawled to the horizon in every direction. Overhead, the sun shone through a clear sky. It was as perfect a day as Mariner had ever seen, at least outside of Risa’s immaculately manufactured weather.

“First,” Tendi said, “We set up our safety net.” And she drew a squat, beacon-like device from the case, adhering its base to the ferrocrete near the edge of the water.

Mariner immediately recognized the device. While not a net per se, the device performed a similar function, using low-powered tractor beams to keep monitored life signs within preset distances. She had seen a model like the one Tendi had produced used back when she’d been learning to swim as a child. If any of the kids in the class dropped below the surface of the water, they were grabbed and lifted out, held in a gentle beam until the swim instructor could collect them. Larger, taller models were often found looming over popular beaches, where they automatically rescued anyone careless enough to be caught in a riptide.

“So, we’re swimming?” Mariner said, incredulous. Splashing around next to a utility structure didn’t sound terrible, but if Tendi had wanted to swim, they could have reserved a holodeck and picked a far nicer location.

Tendi grinned, and said, “Nope! We are putting on these…” From the case, she produced two pairs of dark, broad sunglasses, keeping one for herself and handing the other to Mariner. “And we’re sitting in these.”

She drew out two long, thin rolls of nylon, which she spread into matching flat black rectangles on the ledge. Each rectangle had a ridge of thick silver all around its edge, and one corner composed of a bright red button. When Tendi pinched the button of one, a micro-compressor inside sucked greedily at the air, inflating the silver trim into a large, rounded, balloon-like rectangular ring with a nylon seat in the middle: a rudimentary inflatable floating chair.

While the second floatie inflated, Tendi pushed the first into the water. The safety net immediately latched on with a pencil-thin beam, ensuring that the floatie wouldn’t drift out from the edge. “We,” declared Tendi, “are going to float here, stare at a real ocean, and relax.” 

She stripped off her uniform jacket, revealing a sporty top of her own, a twin to Mariner’s swimsuit, but in Science blue instead of Command red.

Mariner grinned and followed suit, shucking her uniform and folding it carefully at the high end of the ledge where the waters couldn’t reach. “You’re a genius,” she told Tendi. “The only thing that could make it better would be—”

Tendi reached into her carrying case once again, this time retrieving a pair of silver thermal cups. She tossed one of the cups to Mariner. One eyebrow rose expectantly from behind her dark sunglasses.

Cracking the lid of the cup, Mariner smelled a wash of fruity aromas and the tantalizingly familiar scent of Andorian mash, her favorite liqueur. Her face split with a massive grin.

“Oh, you little sneakster,” she teased.

 

---

 

Mariner awoke with a snort. For half a second, she panicked, feeling herself adrift, with no purchase for her hands or feet. Had the ship lost gravity? Were they in the middle of an emergency? 

Then she opened her eyes to the bright sky and the real sun overhead. She felt the lapping waters gently rocking the floatie in which she lay, and heard the whisper of the safety net’s tractor beam keeping her within three meters of the slipway’s ledge. When she lifted her head to look around, her hair emerged from the water behind her, dragging half a liter of seawater with it.

“Did I fall asleep?” she asked.

Tendi lounged in her own floatie next to Mariner, and hummed in the affirmative. “Just for a little while. I dosed you with some more dermal protection about an hour ago. Didn’t want you to burn,” she said, and pulled a hypospray from the little pouch she’d clipped around her waist. Apparently, the pouch was something called a fanny pack, a name that confused Mariner, but a device whose functionality had proven invaluable for Tendi to keep all sorts of useful things inside of it.

“Mmm,” Mariner groaned appreciatively, and let her head drop back onto her inflated headrest. “This is the only way to get radiation burns: low, slow, and with something cold to drink.” 

She felt around the inside of her floatie for her thermal cup, but could not find it. Looking up again, she saw that their safety net had produced a third tractor beam next to her, in which her thermal cup floated above the water. The beam dissipated as she took up the cup again and lifted it to the device with cheers. 

“Thank you,” she said to the emitter, and drained the last of her fruity cocktail. Smacking her lips, she tossed the cup back onto the ledge, watching it bounce and land near their discarded uniforms. “And thank you for the drink. Although it could have been a little stronger…”

“Oh, a thousand pardons, Your Grace,” Tendi said in a tone dripping with hollow apology. “Your humble servant didn’t want you to dehydrate out here, or get caught drunk in the shuttle going back.”

“Yes, well, since the rest of this has been so great, I suppose I can overlook that small failing,” Mariner said graciously. “Seriously, T. You’re the best. Thanks.”

“You needed a break,” Tendi said. “And what better place to take it than on the edge of the world?”

With the slipway behind them, Mariner stared out at the horizon and truly felt Tendi’s words. They were at the edge of a strange new—albeit heavily populated and trafficked—world. Moments like these were what had made ancient sailors brave the sea at storm, and what made modern Starfleet brave the void.

Of course, it was easier to feel brave when astride the helm of a ship. But floating on a scrap of nylon and staring into infinity changed the perspective. It made hopes and dreams feel small compared to the vastness of the universe, true. But it also made problems and worries feel equally small. 

I love you.

When the words came unbidden again, Mariner didn’t flinch. She had time, and distance, and space, and almost the right amount of Andorian alcohol, to let those words wash through her without worrying about what they meant. 

It was such a small phrase. Yet somehow, it filled everything to the horizon, feeling unfathomably huge. Weightless. Like air, or sunshine. Like the sky itself.

“Hey, Tendi,” she said, “have you ever told anyone that you love them?”

“Of course! Watch this,” Tendi said. Clearing her throat, she announced primly, “Mariner? I love you.”

Mariner snorted a laugh. “Yeah, no. Not quite what I meant. Has there ever been anyone who made you feel… I don’t know. Scared to say it? But, at the same time, scared that you wouldn’t get to say it? And that they wouldn’t say it back?”

A moment later, when no reply came, Mariner looked over questioningly. She found Tendi staring at her over the top of her sunglasses, her eyes comically watering and her lower lip trembling in a pout.

Rolling her eyes, Mariner said, “I love you too, Tendi.”

Grinning, Tendi slid her glasses back up her nose and reclined into her floatie. “I do know what you mean,” she said. “And…no. Not really.”

“No offense, but that sounds crazy to me. Out of everybody I know, you wear your heart on your sleeve the most,” said Mariner. “You need, like, extra-long sleeves for all the heart you wear.”

Tendi’s green cheeks darkened with embarrassment. “I know. I think that might have been the problem,” she admitted. “Back on Orion, living with your ‘heart on your sleeve’ didn’t win you any friends. In fact, it did the opposite. Syndicate life is all about posturing, and scheming, and double-crossing. You saw, like, a minute of it when we went to my sister’s wedding.”

Mariner’s hand reflexively touched her shoulder. She winced at the memory of the multiple knives she’d taken during her relatively brief visit to Orion. “Yours are not what I would call a ‘cuddly’ people,” she agreed.

She did not mention that she had noticed Tendi say back on Orion and not back home.

Nodding, Tendi said, “Loving somebody there is either a liability or a status symbol. If you have a lover, and everybody knows it, that means you’re powerful enough to protect them. Maybe if I stayed…” She shook her head, tossing off the notion. “I was much happier when I got to Starfleet Academy. I could finally be myself.”

Something in Tendi’s tone made Mariner hear an omitted qualifier. “Except…?” Mariner prompted.

Tendi blushed again, and fought to sound casual. “Well, you know what kind of reputation Orions have on Earth. If we aren’t pirates, then we’re pheromone-soaked sirens who lure good officers into dark alleys. If I was going to survive at the Academy, I had to be the perfect cadet. The Model Orion who broke all of the stereotypes.”

Mariner winced. “Yeah. I’ve been guilty of throwing that kind of crap in your face before too. Sorry.”

Waving a hand, Tendi insisted, “Ancient history. But it did take dating off the table. And, I guess once I graduated, it was easier to just keep that part of me turned off. Who has time for romance when there are samples to titrate, or anomalies to catalog?”

A thought occurred to Mariner. Softly, she said, “Tendi, are you a virgin?”

Tendi pulled her sunglasses down again, this time for a withering stare.

Lifting her hands in apology, Mariner said, “Okay, okay. Sorry. Though it would be fine if you were, for the record.” 

“I said I had to be careful growing up on Orion, Mariner,” Tendi said, lifting her glasses again. “I wasn’t cloistered.”

Chuckling, Mariner nodded, and said, “I would kill for those details. Seriously, point to anyone working on that landing pad behind us. I will vaporize them the second you spill.”

“You’re going to need much, much stronger drinks to pry those stories out of me,” Tendi said, a hint of embarrassment coloring her cheeks again.

“What are we talking about? Boys? Girls? Both?” Then Mariner gasped in excitement, and guessed, “Other?”

“Shut up!” Tendi cackled, and splashed seawater at her.

They laughed together, letting the moment wind down as their eyes fell back to the horizon. 

“What about you?” Tendi asked.

“Hmm?”

“Have you ever said ‘I love you’ to someone like that?” Tendi asked.

Mariner went silent. A dozen different old wounds, long since scarred over, opened back up and flooded her with memories.

“Sorry,” said Tendi. “You don’t have to answer.”

“No, it’s fine,” Mariner said quickly. “I’m just thinking…”

“That many?” Tendi said in a cautiously teasing tone.

“A few,” admitted Mariner. “Mostly when I was a kid. My first boyfriend, before my parents transferred off the Enterprise. My first girlfriend, before her parents got transferred to the Odyssey. That didn’t end well for anyone,” she said, wincing. “One or two relationships at the Academy that lasted just long enough to feel serious. But after that…”

Not enough space for love and war at the same time. At least, not for her. And there were precious few people who stuck around long enough to even become options. 

She shrugged. “Like you said. It’s easier to just turn that part of yourself off. Who has time for romance when you’re boldly going places?”

Tendi was quiet for nearly a minute. Then, in a deathly serious voice, she asked, “Mariner? Are you a virgin?”

Mariner nearly fell out of her floatie laughing. “Fuck you!” she wheezed.

“I’m serious,” Tendi said, her voice pitch-perfectly earnest while Mariner cracked up. “There are some informational videos in sickbay’s library that could help, if you have any questions.” But as Mariner laughed in her face, Tendi’s facade broke, and she couldn’t help but giggle in kind.

Wiping the tears out from under her sunglasses, Mariner sighed and held her aching ribs. Her toes dipped back into the ocean, and she savored the feeling of wet seaspray on her bare legs. “Oh, I deserved that. Good one.”

“Thank you,” Tendi replied graciously. Her sunglasses tilted overhead, and she said, “We should think about heading back soon. We don’t want to miss the last shuttle.”

“Mmhm…” hummed Mariner. A thought had niggled at the back of her mind throughout their excursion. If they were close to the end of it, she felt safe enough in giving it voice. “We’re not actually AWOL, are we,” she said, not making it a question.

For a long, pointed moment, only the ocean spoke between them, lapping against the side of the slipway. Then, in a tiny voice, Tendi squeaked, “No.”

Mariner nodded. Ransom’s real authorization code attached to such a silly mission, especially when the entire crew had been dedicated to keeping on-schedule for such a large project, had seemed suspicious from the beginning. “Was it Ransom, or my mom?” she asked.

“...both,” admitted Tendi. “But it was only after I went to them. Because I was worried about you.”

“I should have known. You could only have gotten the word ‘hooky’ from some old, old, old-ass human,” she chuckled. Then she looked over, and saw her friend on the verge of tears, and her heart sank. “No, Tendi, it’s okay,” Mariner said soothingly.

But Tendi continued, her voice rising in pitch and speed, “We were all worried about you! You were working double shifts voluntarily, and skipping meals. We weren’t even sure if you were sleeping! I was the one who went to them with my concerns, so if you’re going to be mad at anyone—”

“Tendi,” Mariner said, this time forcefully. “I promise, it’s really okay. Thank you.”

“So, you’re not mad?” Tendi asked, flinching.

Mariner stretched, groaning as her sun-warmed limbs brushed the water. “Way too relaxed for that. But even if I was capable of being angry at anything right now, I couldn’t be angry at you,” she said. “It has been pointed out to me that I, on occasion, suck at taking care of myself. So I want to be better about appreciating it when someone else steps in and does it for me. Even though you shouldn’t have to.”

Tendi shook her head. “That’s just what friends do,” she said, speaking as though it were a fundamental truth of the universe. 

For Tendi, it may as well have been.

“Hey, Tendi?”

When Tendi looked over, she saw Mariner offering an outstretched hand.

“I love you,” said Mariner.

Tendi smiled, and wrapped her hand in Mariner’s. “I love you too,” she said.

 

---

 

Riding up in a shuttle wearing a wet swimsuit underneath her uniform proved to be a small price to pay for Mariner. As she ducked out of the shuttle and back onto the familiar decking of the Cerritos, she felt lighter than she had in days. She practically floated between the stacks of crates being loaded into the shuttle for its next trip, not even bothering to hide the look of utter contentment on her face.

That feeling lasted for all of thirty seconds before she saw Rutherford anxiously waiting for them at the far side of the shuttlebay.

“You guys!” Rutherford cried, rushing toward them with a PADD in hand. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I wanted you to hear it as soon as you got back!”

A pit opened up in Mariner’s stomach, dropping all of the lightness inside of her down into inky, empty nothingness. Her body felt numb, and heavy.

Tendi reached for the PADD in her stead, her own face paling. “What happened? Is it Boimler?” she asked.

Nodding vigorously, Rutherford said, “They got him out of surgery, and started backing off on the cognitive inhibitor. I don’t understand everything of what’s in Doctor T’Ana’s report but—”

“—early signs of neural activity suggest full cognitive retention,” Tendi read aloud, her voice brightening with each word. “He’s stable! And they think he’s going to make a full recovery!”

“Isn’t it great?” Rutherford exclaimed, and pulled them both into a bear hug.

As her friends cried and jabbered elatedly, Mariner pressed her face against Rutherford’s broad chest. A sense of great relief washed through her, carrying away the bulk of her worries.

And beneath that, the pit in her stomach sank immeasurably deeper.

Chapter 5: Alone In A Crowd

Summary:

There's no solace to be found at the bottom of a bottle, and no lonelier feeling than being surrounded by well-meaning friends.

Chief Medical Officer’s Log, Supplemental: After fourteen hours of surgery, the synthiderm application procedure is complete. Lieutenant Boimler is now the proud owner of new skin and nerve endings. Over time, his body will subsume the artificial dermis with new cells.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to fix Boimler’s face.

 

---

 

Seated alone at a booth in the ship’s lounge, Mariner spat her drink as she read from her illicit feed of sickbay’s logs. She set the cocktail aside and grimaced, dreading to read further.

Despite my best efforts, the log continued, we could only restore his facial features to their previous uninjured configuration, with none of the badly needed aesthetic improvements. I’m not a miracle worker. But he should still look good enough for any nosy junior lieutenants who give a shit about that kind of thing.

Mariner scowled. “Cheap shot, T’Ana,” she grumbled, and picked up her drink again. The comedic doctor had clearly caught on to Mariner’s log access. T’Ana would likely edit her log before entering it permanently into the ship’s record. 

Or perhaps she wouldn’t. The Caitian was well known for the size and number of fucks she didn’t give.

Underneath the table, Mariner’s foot tapped a nervous rhythm against the carpet. She hadn’t been able to sit still since Rutherford had broken the news that Boimler would recover. And she would have loved to pretend as though she didn’t know why.

I love you.

In the immediate aftermath, when Boimler hung between life and death, the question of his last-minute confession had been largely academic. How had it made her feel? Why had he said it? What did it mean?

But tomorrow, Schrodinger’s Confession would emerge from its box, and the waveform would collapse into measurable feelings. Boimler would awaken. Then all of her musings, and worrying, and questioning, and wondering, would become starkly real. Into what shape, she could not guess. And that terrified her.

What did he expect from her? What did he want from her? What did she want from him?

A familiar face at the replicator caught her attention. She waved frantically, gesturing an invitation to join her. And, after a longer than normal amount of hesitation, Lieutenant T'Lyn did just that, sliding into the seat across from Mariner’s and setting down a glass of tepid water.

“Lieutenant,” the Vulcan said, nodding in greeting.

“Hey, T'Lyn!” Mariner exclaimed too loudly. “What’s up? What is happening? Tell me what’s going on! Tell me everything! Tell me something! Even, like, just one thing!”

Lifting an eyebrow, T'Lyn set her water aside and noted, “You appear to be emotionally distressed.”

“What? No!” Mariner scoffed. “I’m good. I’m good! Everything is all good here. We’re good! Good! Gooooooood! Good. Am I saying ‘good’ too many times?”

“Your repetition of the word renders its veracity suspect,” agreed T'Lyn.

“Right. Sorry,” Mariner said, and steadied herself with a breath. “I am…fine. Just a little anxious.”

“Would I be correct in surmising that your anxiety is related to Lieutenant Boimler’s scheduled awakening in sickbay tomorrow?” asked T'Lyn.

Wincing, Mariner said, “You would be correct. I guess I still don’t know what I’m going to say. You know, since he…”

As Mariner trailed off, T'Lyn picked up the sentence. “—professed his love for you over an open channel,” she finished.

“Right,” Mariner sighed. “I guess nobody’s still talking about that.”

“Incorrect. Your relationship with Lieutenant Boimler has remained a popular subject of non-work-related conversation among the crew throughout the previous week,” T'Lyn reported.

Pressing her lips into a flat line, Mariner deadpanned, “Thanks for that. Really what I wanted to hear.”

“My apologies. I shall attempt to convey a falsehood for the sake of social nicety,” T'Lyn said. A beat later, with a somber expression, she continued, “Your relationship with Lieutenant Boimler has not remained a popular subject of non-work-related conversation among the crew throughout the previous week.”

Mariner stared at her, blinking. “I genuinely can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or supportive right now,” she admitted.

T'Lyn sipped at her water.

“Whatever,” grumped Mariner. “It’s not like it matters, right? It doesn’t mean anything. Like, he says those dopey words, and like a magic spell, we’re just dating now?” Her stomach plummeted, and she buried her hands in her face. “Oh, my God, what if he thinks we’re dating now that he said that? Is that what everyone assumes? That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“Having only an academic understanding of human coupling, I am unqualified to provide input,” T'Lyn said.

Mariner sighed and let her hands drop. She had thought of nothing else for an entire day, working her fingers to the bone in Cargo Bay Five, until finally giving up and collapsing into a cocktail in the lounge. Even that had given her little solace. 

As she stared across the table, watching T'Lyn drink in silence, a thought occurred to Mariner. “You know,” she said, “I’ve probably been to Vulcan half a dozen times. But I’ve never seen anything even hinting at ‘Vulcan’ coupling.”

“Nor would you,” said T'Lyn. “It is a private matter, rarely discussed with those not directly involved.”

“Sure, but there must be something to it,” insisted Mariner. “I mean, everyone knows about pon farr…” When she saw T'Lyn’s eyebrow rise, she hastened to add, “...which we do not have to talk about, because Vulcans are very sensitive about pon farr, and it’s rude to bring it up.”

T'Lyn’s eyebrow dropped.

“But what about pairing up? Meeting, mingling, getting to know each other? I mean, not everyone has game like Sarek. Dude pulls a Vulcan princess AND multiple Earth hotties? That’s a high bar to clear,” said Mariner earnestly.

Acknowledging the point with a nod, T'Lyn said, “There are multiple avenues through which a Vulcan typically encounters and subsequently bonds with a mate. Many families continue the practice of arranged marriages, wherein parents select suitable matches for their children.”

Mariner cringed. “And that isn’t seen as regressive?”

The eyebrow rose again, suggesting to Mariner that she had just popped the proverbial foot back in her mouth. “Matches are made using a careful study of the genetics, psychology, and predilections of those individuals in the proposed match. The goal of the practice is to create an ideal match for the mated pair. Even then, both participants are given a right of refusal, and any coercion from their parents to accept an unwanted match is seen as inappropriate,” explained T'Lyn.

“Sorry. That’s my human bias showing,” Mariner apologized, chagrined. “Earth has a few millennia’s worth of history where women were basically political currency and/or breeding stock for families arranging convenient marriages.”

“Similar barbaric practices exist in Vulcan history as well,” admitted T'Lyn. “‘Ancient’ Vulcan history.”

“So,” Mariner said, pushing past the awkward moment, “Vulcan families do the math to manufacture soul mates. Very logical. But if there’s a right of refusal, then you’re saying it doesn’t always work. And I can’t imagine that every single family does it.”

“No,” agreed T'Lyn. “Some amount of spontaneity remains in the practice of Vulcan coupling. Just as I have observed in other sentient species, unbonded Vulcans who encounter one another throughout the course of their lives may develop a kinship of great significance, wherein they then mutually agree to transition their relationship into matrimony."

Mariner tapped her finger on the table, flummoxed. “I’m trying really hard to imagine a Vulcan meet-cute right now,” she admitted.

“Excuse me,” one says, “but you appear to have mistaken my datapad for yours.”

“Yes,” the other agrees, “and you, mine.”

“Would you care to partake in a hot caffeinated beverage as we exchange for the correct datapads and discuss their contents?” asks the first.

“Thank you, but I do not ingest caffeine after the end of the designated morning period. I will simply accept my datapad,” the other answers.

“Understandable. Here is your datapad. Thank you for mine. Live long and prosper,” the first says.

“Live long and prosper,” echoes the second.

Shaking her head, Mariner said, “Nope. Just can’t see it.”

“The details of the process likely differ quite extensively from the practices of other species, but the fundamental concept remains largely the same,” said T'Lyn.

“I’ve always wondered, though,” Mariner said, “what happens to Vulcans who don’t get an arranged marriage, and aren’t lucky enough to meet someone. When their p —uhh, when it’s ‘that time of the decade,’ what do they do?”

T'Lyn took a long time to answer. “When that occurs, a Vulcan will attempt to forestall or overcome their biological imperative through the act of meditation,” she said.

Slyly, Mariner noted, “The word ‘attempt’ implies that it doesn’t always work.”

Another long pause. T'Lyn’s finger tapped against her glass. Then, she admitted, “When meditation is insufficient, and a Vulcan finds themself in need, there are…temples. These temples provide sanctuary for those unbonded, who may intermingle freely and satiate the needs of the moment. Privacy is considered sacrosanct within the temples. Often, anonymity is employed by its visitors for maximum discretion.”

Mariner’s jaw hit the table. “Are you telling me,” she whisper-screamed, “that there are freaking Vulcan love hotels?”

T'Lyn’s mouth twitched. For the Vulcan, it may as well have been a frustrated scream. “There is,” she said tightly, “an extremely tenuous, superficial correlation between the two concepts.”

“Hey, I think it’s great,” Mariner said quickly, lifting her hands in a placating gesture. She at least had the good sense to not point out how odd it seemed that T'Lyn knew what a love hotel was in the first place. “If anything, it’s the one that makes the most sense to me. I can’t imagine why such a logical culture would bother with all the complications of dating and marriage anyway when they already developed the perfect solution.”

“The bonds between mates need not be rooted in emotion,” T'Lyn countered. “Isolation is a useful tool for self-reflection, meditation, and contemplation. But like most other tools, it is not meant to be employed for all situations. The benefits of collectivism are self-evident. Societies form as cooperation becomes codified. Habit becomes tradition. Existence becomes easier in innumerable ways for all involved as people pool knowledge, resources, and effort toward a common benefit. And just as this proves true in the macrocosm, so too does it translate to a personal scale: individuals are drawn to each other, sharing experiences, learning and growing together, aiding each other through hardship, and collaborating to create success.”

“The family you’re born with, and the family you choose?” Mariner asked, smiling.

“Quite,” agreed T'Lyn. “My own experiences are evidence of the benefit to such social connection. Under the Vulcan High Command, I often found myself at odds with my peers. My initiative was seen as disruptive, and was therefore unwelcome. I believe my transfer to a Starfleet vessel was meant as punishment for this behavior. Yet,” she admitted, and her voice almost softened, “once I acclimated to the chaotic environment of the Cerritos, I found that my initiative was not only welcomed, but encouraged. That encouragement I received from my crewmates in turn allowed me to facilitate comparable positive growth in them. Or so I would like to believe.”

“Aw… We like you too, T,” Mariner said, reaching out and patting T'Lyn’s hand, to no reaction. “But we’re not exactly dating you.” She paused, and added, “You’d tell us if we were dating you, right? I have no idea if Vulcan polycules even exist, so if I accidentally wandered into one…”

“You have not,” T'Lyn reassured her. “My intent was to illustrate how the benefits of social bonds transcend emotions. Having relationships is, ultimately, logical.” She drained the last of her water, setting her glass aside. “I have observed such a bond between you and Lieutenant Boimler. In my brief time here, you have both demonstrated a kind of cooperation wherein you each provide the other support for your individual shortcomings.”

“If I actually had any shortcomings, I might agree with you,” said Mariner, chuckling. When she noticed T'Lyn’s flat stare, she added, “That was a joke.”

“Indeed.”

“But, yes. I mean, Bradward Boimler is what happens when a mold culture in the science lab outgrows its petri dish and starts having opinions,” Mariner huffed, “but we’re friends. That’s as deep as it goes between us.”

“Then,” T'Lyn noted, “you have been imposing emotional strife upon yourself for the past week over the circumstances of Lieutenant Boimler’s confession for no reason, as you have already decided on the course of action to take. You do not return his feelings, and need only tell him.”

“Yep. That’s obviously what I’m going to do,” Mariner said tiredly, feeling as much certainty in the words as she had all throughout the prior week. Her knuckles rapped the tabletop as her mind continued to spin. “So,” she said idly, “these Vulcan love temples… Do they ever accept non-Vulcans? And is there a waiting list, or—”

T'Lyn stood from the booth and left the lounge, pausing only long enough to feed her empty glass back into the replicator.

“Yeah, you’re right. I crossed a boundary there,” Mariner called after her. “This is good for us, T'Lyn! We’re growing together socially, and—! She’s gone.” Mariner sighed at the closing lounge doors, and then sagged deeper into her seat. 

Of course her relationship with Boimler went deeper than friendship. That was the problem. She relied on Boimler in a thousand little ways, which had become starkly obvious in his absence over the past week. But did that make it love? 

She was so sick of all these questions. So sick of not knowing what to do. She almost wished that she could just do what she always did when it came to tough personal decisions, and screw things up so badly that it eliminated any other way forward, rendering the original choice moot. 

Her eyes flicked to the bar. Seizing her empty glass, Mariner extricated herself from the booth and strode toward the front of the lounge. 

What are you doing, Mariner? she asked herself.

Seated at adjacent barstools, Doctor Migleemo had cornered Commander Ransom into some kind of animated discussion. The avian therapist gestured, describing some process to Ransom, while the cocktail in his feathered hand threatened to spill onto his tweed suit jacket with each excited motion. Mariner only caught the tail end of the conversation as she approached.

“—pulverized asteroids,” explained Migleemo, “and then added sewage and compostables for organic components. The mixture would sit in fields for a few years at a time, intermingling, until it was finally ready to be transported to its intended terraforming project!”

Ransom frowned, swirling his highball glass and its amber liquid contents. “Huh. So you were ‘literally’ a dirt farmer? As in, your family—”

“Cultivated dirt, yes!” Migleemo laughed. “Of course, the mega-worms did most of the processing. And they made for quite a delicious entree once their work had finished. You haven’t lived until you’ve had steak from a worm the size of a shuttlecraft!”

“That…sounds nice…” hedged Ransom.

“Oh, my, no, it was terrible! What a stench! And compared to modern terraforming practices, it’s quite archaic. That’s why I got out of there as soon as I could. And here I am now!” chortled Migleemo. His face brightened as he saw Mariner approaching, and his beak opened in a birdlike smile. “Ah, Lieutenant Mariner! The Hero of the Nautilus! Please, won’t you join us for a drink? I was just regaling the commander with tales of my misspent youth!”

“Hey, Doc. Hi, Commander,” Mariner said. She set her empty glass on the bar. “Actually, I wanted to thank you, sir. For that ‘assignment’ yesterday.”

Ransom couldn’t quite hide his smirk behind his highball glass. “Not sure what you mean by that. Just routine survey work that needed to be done for the next poor saps who get stuck with refurbishing those canals. Lieutenant Tendi’s report was very encouraging.”

“It was a nice change of pace from the cargo bay,” she agreed. “Made me think that I might be ready to get back to my regular duties. If that’s okay with you.”

“I thought you might feel that way,” Ransom said. “I’ll have a new assignment for you tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks,” she said.

Okay. That was nice. You acknowledged what he did for you, he was cool about it, and you don’t have to sort cargo containers all day anymore. Good job, she told herself.

“You know,” she continued, “I’ve been thinking. You and I should work out sometime.”

Uh, what? she thought.

“Uh, what?” Ransom said, puzzled.

Draping herself against the bar, Mariner played with her empty glass, sliding it back and forth as she appraised Ransom from the boots-up. “You’ve got a good fit, Commander. Everyone can see it. Maybe I want some of that too.”

Smirking, Ransom flexed an arm. The fabric of his uniform strained with bulging muscle underneath. “If you’re looking to up your gains, you’re welcome to join me. I usually hit the gym by Oh-Five-Hundred.”

“Splendid! Physical health is such an important part of mental health!” Migleemo crowed. He looked down at his own rounded waistcoat, poking himself in the belly. “I might also join you, Commander. I’m getting a little ‘plump’ myself. The price of living well, eh?” he said, and laughed.

“I was actually thinking more like right now. In your office,” Mariner said.

What the fuck? she screamed internally.

Ransom froze, his drink poised halfway to his lips. Slowly, he set the glass aside, then fixed her with a look of disbelief. “Excuse me?” he said.

“There’s plenty of room in your office,” she said nonchalantly. Her finger traced the rim of her empty glass while her gaze lingered on his dimpled chin. “Lots to do in there to work up a good sweat.”

“Exercise in the evening?” Migleemo mused, rubbing his beak. “Well, I suppose if it’s not immediately before bedtime, it won’t disrupt your sleep. But so soon after synthehol? We should hydrate first. Er, garçon ? Three waters, por favor!”

Just as she had to him, Ransom let his gaze wander up from her feet all the way to her sultry smile. “I didn’t think I was your type of workout partner,” he admitted.

“I have fif—sixteen types when it comes to workouts,” Mariner replied.

No! her mind screamed. No! No! No! No! No!

“And Lieutenant Boimler?” he said.

“Pfft. Bradward Boimler is a loose strand of spaghetti,” Mariner said. “I prefer my workout partners to be…meatier.”

Holy shit, you did not just say that to Jack fucking Ransom, you absolute fucking moron!

“Ooh, carbo-loading!” Migleemo exclaimed as the bartender passed a trio of waters across the bar. “Should we get spaghetti? I don’t usually like to eat so late at night, but right now it sounds yummy!”

“How ‘bout it, Jack? Feel like getting your blood pumping?” Her lips wrapped breathily around that last word as she gazed deeply into his eyes.

His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “I think…” he said, leaning toward her.

Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit! she shrieked silently. Her face remained a study in desire.

“...that I told you I wasn’t going to let you self-sabotage anymore,” he continued. 

“What?” she said. Her feet snared on the stool behind her, and she stumbled.

“I think you should get some rest tonight,” he told her. “And tomorrow morning, when the doctors wake up Boimler, you should be there to see him. He was injured under your command, after all. And a good commander should be there for their officers. Wouldn’t you agree, Lieutenant?”

“I… Uh… Yes, sir,” she stammered, and straightened.

“And after you talk with Boimler,” he said, his voice lowering, his body drawing nearer to her, “and you decide you still feel like working out with me…”

“Uh…” Both her mind and body went blank, awash in the scent of sweat, cologne, and whiskey.

“...you’ll still be my boss’s daughter.” 

Smirking, he backed away, marinating in her slack-jawed confusion. Then he turned and left the lounge.

Migleemo left his waters on the bar to chase Ransom. “Uh, Commander! Perhaps you could provide me with a few fitness tips as well! We could certainly use your office, if you’d prefer!”

Mariner collapsed onto a stool, letting her forehead thunk against the bartop as she groaned. Of all the responses to a love confession she could think of, I fucked our boss while you were in a coma might have been the worst. Certainly it ranked in the bottom-five. 

But it would have presented a clean solution to all of her quandaries. Boimler would hate her and never want to see her again. It would undoubtedly ruin her working relationship with Ransom, making him hate her too. And she could hate herself as well, making it a consensus. Hell, her mother might be angry enough to transfer her off the ship again. Then she wouldn’t have to see anyone on the Cerritos anymore. Devastating, all of it. But an ending she could predict.

A soft chuckle from nearby made Mariner pull her head up from the bartop. Lieutenant Kayshon, the ship’s Tamarian security officer, was observing her misery from further down the bar. He lifted a glass to her in mocking cheers, and said, “Parsiknee at the lord’s folly.”

Mariner didn’t recognize his native phrase, but she knew when she was being mocked. “Alakra alone, his passions turned inward,” she retorted, and lifted a middle finger to him.

The Tamarian language had taken Starfleet almost a hundred years to crack. One enterprising captain had finally solved the riddle, realizing that their language consisted of metaphors referencing ancient stories collected from their shared planetary history. Once Starfleet knew how to ask for copies of those stories, communication rapidly snowballed between the Tamarian and Federation cultures. Kayshon had become the first Tamarian to join Starfleet, and while he spoke fluent Federation Standard, Mariner noticed that he often lapsed into Tamarian when caught off-guard by something funny or worrying.

Rather than offend, Mariner’s words seemed to delight Kayshon. “Well put, Lieutenant! I didn’t realize you had studied Tamarian language.”

“Not much of it,” Mariner admitted, lowering her offensive gesture. “I have a subroutine on my PADD for any new species coming aboard. It compiles their languages’ common swears and curses together for me into a linguistics learning package. Helps me get my point across to newcomers.”

He slid down the bar, cupping his hands around a tall glass of synthale as he moved stools to sit next to Mariner. “I would never have imagined I would appreciate someone telling me to ‘go fuck myself.’ Funny, eh, what makes us house-sick?”

“Homesick? Yeah,” Mariner agreed. “Also, sorry for saying that. It’s been a long week.”

“I had it coming,” Kayshon admitted, rubbing at his bare orange scalp.

“What did that mean, anyway? ‘Parsnip’s folly,’ or whatever you said?”

“‘Parsiknee at the lord’s folly?’ It’s difficult to translate,” he equivocated, looking down into his ale in thought. “I suppose you could call it ‘the perverse pleasure taken from another’s consternation or mild suffering.’”

“Oh, sure!” Mariner said. “Humans call that schadenfreude. It’s German.”

“Schadenfreude,” he repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth. “I like it. But Germ-Man sounds unhygienic.”

“Nah, Germany’s nice. Good people. Even better beer,” Mariner said sagely.

“Hmm. Then I’ll endeavor to see Germ-Many when we next visit Earth,” Kayshon decided. Wryly, he added, “You may wish to join me. The pain of what I just witnessed will indeed linger for a long while, necessitating many strong drinks.”

“You, uh, caught that?” Mariner said. “Ugh. What am I saying? Tamarian is all about ‘reading between the lines.’ Of course you did.”

“I take it, then, that the rumors regarding you and Lieutenant Boimler are false,” he said, his hairless brows rising in mild surprise. 

“Bradward Boimler,” Mariner growled, “is a sapient wet blanket wearing a combadge.”

“I’ve never heard that particular idiom before, but your face and tone make its meaning clear,” he said. 

“Then you understand it better than I do,” grumbled Mariner. She folded her arms over her PADD atop the bar and laid her chin atop her hands. “I dunno, man. What do your people say when someone tells them ‘I love you?’”

Kayshon shrugged. “You could say, ‘I love you too?’ Or ‘thank you,’ I suppose, if it’s not exactly mutual.”

“Yeah, but what’s that in Tamarian?” she asked, waving her hand. “Give me a good metaphor to bust out on a date.”

“There are dozens of phrases I could offer. Maybe even hundreds,” Kayshon said. “It would depend on what you meant by ‘love.’”

Slowly, Mariner’s head lifted from the bar, and she stared at Kayshon. “Thank you. Thank you, man! Yes!” she cried, and clapped him on the arm. “Finally! Everyone around here has been acting like it’s obvious, but it’s really confusing, right? Like, what does that stupid phrase even mean? ‘I love you.’ It could mean anything! It’s so stupid!”

“Well, perhaps not ‘stupid,’” he hedged.

“Maybe we should all just speak Tamarian,” Mariner insisted. “Memorize the old stories, and whenever we want to say how we feel, we just point to a character, or a moment, and say, ‘that is how I feel.’ No ambiguity, just a straight freaking example. Easy.”

Kayshon chuckled, shaking his head. “Tamarian is hardly a language of objective truths, Mariner. It’s just the opposite, like every other language in the Federation.”

“But it’s all derived from, like, super-old stories, right? How much could things change?” she said, confused.

“Our language evolves with new meaning just as other languages do,” Kayshon insisted. “Those ‘super-old stories’—or, as we refer to them, the Foundational Texts—were not discovered on the side of a mountain, writ from some fundamental force of the universe. They were retellings of oral traditions, which were then transcribed into the many ancient languages we had before we developed a unified world culture, and then translated using a modern vernacular. Every five years, our oldest, wisest, most pedantic scholars gather in a conclave to debate the meaning of particular passages in the Foundational Texts. Perhaps something from them is reinterpreted, or the accuracy of an old translation is challenged, changing the nuance of the metaphor.” He grinned, and tugged at his gold Security uniform. “The most recent of these conclaves caused quite a stir. Many new concepts from the Federation have steeped our younger generations, forcing the old ones to adapt to much change.”

Mariner frowned, considering the implications. “Are you telling me that your entire language is under the direct control of a bunch of literary scholars?” she said, flabbergasted. “Yikes.”

“The profession doesn’t seem to be as respected in the Federation at large as it is on my homeworld,” Kayshon agreed. “But take comfort in the fact that meaning and objectivity eludes us as it does all others. The universe is consistent in its inconsistency.”

She did not take comfort in his words, however. If anything, they made her even more tired. “Thanks for the culture lesson, but I think I’m gonna take Ransom’s advice. I’m going to bed.”

He nodded as she stood to leave. “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean,” he said.

PADD in hand, Mariner left the lounge and wandered toward the nearest turbolift. Perhaps a night of staring at the ceiling in dread would provide her the answers she so desperately wanted. Asleep or not, she couldn’t keep the morning from coming. Boimler would wake up, and then…

Well, that was really the only question, wasn’t it? What happened after that?

The turbolift doors opened, and Mariner started forward automatically. Then she registered the person already in the turbolift, and she hesitated.

Lieutenant Shaxs, the ship’s massive tactical officer, loomed at the back of the lift, his frame obscuring most of the back wall. He glanced down at Mariner in the doorway, his one good eye smoldering at her. After a moment, he said, “In or out, Lieutenant?”

Mariner shook off her hesitation and jumped into the lift. Shaxs had the presence and, often, the disposition of a mountain. And he’d been known to literally rip apart his enemies in the pursuit of protecting the Cerritos. But outside of a battlefield, he was one of the more even-tempered people she’d met. Mariner had never felt uncomfortable around Shaxs before, and wasn’t sure why she had hesitated in the first place. Perhaps she was simply done with people for the day, and had been looking forward to a turbolift all to herself.

Whatever the reason, that feeling of unease became a surge of irritation as Shaxs said, “Can I give you some free advice, Mariner?”

Closing her eyes, Mariner steadied herself with a breath and said, “Sure. Why not?”

“Let him down easy,” said Shaxs.

Mariner looked up at him, blinking slowly. “What did you say?” she growled.

Folding his arms, Shaxs said, “Let him down easy. It’ll be better for both of you.”

Her brow furrowed, and her lips drew back from her teeth as she snarled, “Turbolift: halt!”

The lift stopped quietly, its motors cutting out, leaving them in utter silence. Shaxs glanced down at her with a look of mild curiosity.

“Where do you get off telling me what I should and shouldn’t do?” Mariner exploded. “Why does everybody seem to know what’s going on between me and Boimler? I don’t know what’s going on between me and Boimler! I had no idea he was going to say what he said! I have no idea why he said it! So if I’m completely in the dark, then that must mean that all of the other people who aren’t me and aren’t Boimler have no FUCKING clue what they’re talking about!”

His brows crinkled around his nose ridge. “My mistake. Forget I said anything,” he grunted.

She puffed, still riding the adrenaline high of her tirade, waiting to see if there was anything more. But Shaxs was evidently finished. “Turbolift: resume,” she said.

Catching her breath, Mariner smoothed back her hair, and tugged at her uniform jacket, putting herself back together. But the adrenaline didn’t fade.

“No, you know what? Fuck that. Turbolift: halt!” she snapped. When the lift stopped again, she whirled on him, standing before him with her own arms folded, mirroring his posture with mockery. “Let him down easy?” she sneered.

“That’s what I said,” Shaxs agreed stoically.

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because you can’t say what he said,” Shaxs told her. “Not the way he said it.”

She scoffed. “What the hell does that even mean?”

He lowered his chin, finally meeting her gaze with his mismatched eyes. His face was hardened into a mask, but his voice remained calm and even. “I was on the bridge when we got the distress call. I heard him. I know what he said, and I know why he said it,” Shaxs explained. “And you know why he said it, too.”

“No, I don’t,” she retorted reflexively. As his gaze remained steadfast, she lost her bluster. “N-Not really. Not for s-sure,” she stammered.

“You do. Just like you know you can’t say it back to him. You don’t have that in you,” Shaxs said.

“And you know this because…?” Mariner snarled.

He didn’t budge. “Because I served too, Mariner. And before that, I grew up in worse,” he said.

Mariner’s voice caught in her throat. Before joining Starfleet, Shaxs had been a freedom fighter. He’d battled to liberate his home planet of Bajor from the hands of the Cardassians, probably since he’d been big enough to pick up a rifle. Whatever horrors Mariner could conjure from her time in the war could have been everyday occurrences for a young Shaxs growing up under the Cardassians’ bootheel. And then he had endured Cardassian horrors a second time when they had become a puppet state of the Dominion. 

As if reading her thoughts, Shaxs said, “It’s okay, Mariner. We survived. Mostly. But those experiences change you. They take something from you. And if you try to pretend like it’s all still there, if you lie to him, to yourself, you’re both going to end up hurt.”

Setting her jaw, Mariner lifted her chin and said, “What makes you think you know anything about me?”

“Because it’s not in me anymore either,” said Shaxs.

She scoffed again, shaking her head. “No. That’s bullshit. You and T’Ana are… Everybody knows about your…”

His shoulders bobbed with a tiny laugh. “T’Ana has her own issues with relationships. She and I are the most either of us could hope for. It’s nice. It’s good. But I don’t think anyone would mistake it for love. Least of all T’Ana.”

Teeth clenched, breath ragged, she glared up at Shaxs, gathering a retort that would knock him out of his boots. Because he was wrong. He was just projecting his shit onto Mariner, and she had to call him out on it. Shaxs was wrong.

“It’s easier to just turn that part of yourself off,” she’d said to Tendi while they floated on the ocean.

Because it was merely sleeping inside of her. Turned off. Not gone.

Mariner’s finger shook as she jabbed it in Shaxs’s face. “I can say ‘I love you.’ I can,” she insisted, her voice trembling. “I could say ‘I lo…’ I could say ‘that’ to Boim… If I wanted to…”

His craggy features began to soften with pity. He pitied her. 

He? Pitied her?

“I just never would!” Mariner shouted, scowling so hard that her eyes watered, tracing hot lines down her cheeks. “Bradward Boimler is… He’s a child! Okay? He treats every day like he just stepped off the Academy transport! He’s excited when he gets to replace isolinear chips in a processor! He’s stupid, and naive, and gullible, and…sweet. He’s the exact opposite of who I’d want to be with! So I’d never tell him that I love him. But if I wanted to, I could. I fucking could!”

A pair of enormous hands took her gently by the shoulders. Shaxs was just a smear in front of her, completely hidden behind a veil of tears. Surely he could see they were tears of anger, of righteousness. Because he was so utterly, terribly wrong about everything. About her.

“Okay, Mariner,” he said gently. “Okay.”

She sniffed, and swiped at her face with her fist. “Turbolift: fucking resume already.”

The lift glided back into motion as Mariner composed herself, mopping her eyes with her sleeve. Her ragged breathing smoothed, and she pushed the hair back out of her face. 

“Shore leave coming up in a couple of weeks on Karisstaria,” Shaxs said conversationally, as though the break in their turbolift journey had never happened. “They have crystal forests in the southern hemisphere. Old growth plantlife that manifests into huge translucent crystalline structures. Trees made of gemstone. Supposed to be beautiful.”

“So what?” she grunted.

“Good place for a picnic, maybe,” he said. “If you were making plans.”

She laughed, and sniffled. “What kind of basic bitch move is a picnic?” she sneered. “Grow up and get hammered in dingy bars on shore leave like the rest of us.”

He shrugged. “It’s the kind of date I would have liked, back when I was more like Boimler.”

The doors of the turbolift parted, and Mariner was surprised to see the bridge waiting on the other side. Shaxs lumbered past her without another glance.

As the doors closed, Mariner realized that she had never specified a destination when she’d boarded the turbolift. She started to call for the lower crew deck, ready to go to her quarters. To bed. To pretend to sleep. To not think about tomorrow.

Then she hesitated.

 

---

 

It had been some time since Mariner had been to the bunk hallway at the rear of the saucer section. When she and her friends had been living there, it seemed like a constant hub of activity, with officers passing through at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes it seemed as though the entire ship’s complement would walk right by her bunk on any given day, just passing through to somewhere more important. 

And yet, since her promotion, Mariner had never returned until that night. It seemed somehow smaller, narrower than she remembered. And the traffic was, at that moment, a mere handful of ensigns occupying their bunks, quietly reading in the late hour, or chatting softly with each other. 

Perhaps having her own quarters again had spoiled her for life in the barracks. Or perhaps it had just seemed more lively because she had been there with her friends.

“Mari—um, I mean, Lieutenant?”

Surprise filled the soft blue features of Ensign Jennifer Sh’reyan. She’d been sitting on her bunk, feet on the ground with her PADD on her knees, when Mariner rounded the corridor. Still wearing her Command red uniform, Jennifer set the PADD aside and rose, looking uncertainly in either direction, as though Mariner had come down to the deck for some other reason.

The idea of pretending their meeting was an accident or coincidence appealed to Mariner. But she was too tired for guile. “No ranks right now, please. I’m feeling un-lieutenant-ly tonight,” Mariner said, rubbing at her aching, bloodshot eyes.

“Uh, sure. What can I, um, do for you, Mariner?” Jennifer said.

Curious glances from the few occupied bunks around them began to turn their way. Mariner saw a few faces she recognized from Beta Shift studying their PADDs a little too intently, tilting ears in their direction. Motioning with her chin for Jennifer to follow, Mariner led the way to the observation window at the very back of the hallway.

Jennifer stood at the far end of the window from Mariner, wrapping her arms around her midsection. “It’s… It’s nice to talk to you again?” she said.

Tall, athletic, silver-haired, and with the soft blue features of her native Andor, Jennifer Sh’reyan firmly occupied several of Mariner’s sixteen types at once. She normally carried herself with a confidence that Mariner had found irritating at first, before realizing how unreasonably attracted she actually felt to her fellow Beta Shift ensign. Not so long ago, Mariner and Jennifer had been happily romantically entwined.

Now, though, Mariner had to stop herself from taking a step back. This is a bad idea. You should bail, she thought.

“Yeah,” she said aloud, “you too.”

“Haven’t seen much of you since…you got promoted,” Jennifer continued, using a shaky smile to cover up what she’d almost said instead. In spite of it, Mariner still heard the original words: since I dumped you for something you didn’t do.

“Yeah, I’ve been busy,” Mariner said. 

Bail. Bail! her mind shrieked.

Groaning, Mariner pinched the bridge of her nose, and admitted, “No, that’s a lie. Sorry. I’ve been avoiding you.”

Jennifer’s arms tightened around herself, and she smiled mirthlessly. “I know. I’ve, uh, tried to stay out of your way since you came back. Figured you would come find me if you wanted to talk. And here you are.”

“Yeah.” Sighing, Mariner rubbed at her face and said, “Damn it, this is way more awkward than I wanted to make it. I just… Can I ask you something?”

Shrugging, Jennifer said, “Okay.”

Mariner bit her lip. Her gaze drifted through the window, back toward the sweeping nacelles of the Cerritos looming beneath them at the aft of the ship. A curved slice of Pacifica hung beneath them, turning slowly in the opposite direction of their orbit. 

“Were we going anywhere?” blurted Mariner.

Frowning, Jennifer turned to the window. Mariner watched in the reflection as a silent debate happened behind the Andorian’s slender features. “By ‘going anywhere,’ you mean…?” Jennifer said.

“Were things getting serious between us?” Mariner asked.

Another empty half-smile tilted Jennifer’s lips. “Well, I brought you to meet my friends. Mostly so you could ruin their awful party. But that counts for something, right?”

The memory of phasering Jennifer’s panicking, pretentious friends had once been a sweet one. Now it left Mariner with a sour taste. “This was a mistake. Sorry,” Mariner said, and shook her head, turning to leave.

“Wait! Wait…” Jennifer said, and Mariner paused. Taking a breath, Jennifer smoothed her expression and said, more somberly, “I…I don’t really know, Mariner. We were still kind of new. To be honest, I was just glad you didn’t hate me anymore.”

Mariner stifled a wince. Before she had accepted her attraction to Jennifer, she had been a…well, bully was an ugly word, but it fit her behavior better than Mariner liked. The only person she had teased more, and taunted more, and harassed more, was…

Boimler.

“But,” continued Jennifer, “it was good. We had fun together.” Her hips shifted unconsciously, and a flicker of a genuine smile lit her reflection. “A lot of fun.”

An echo of warmth stirred in Mariner’s stomach. “Yeah,” she agreed. “I guess we never got past the ‘getting to know each other’ phase.”

“To be honest, I didn’t get the sense that you were much interested in that part,” admitted Jennifer. “You always wanted to keep things light.”

Mariner’s guts grew cold again as she remembered. A few times in their whatever-they-were, Jennifer had shared little, carefully curated pieces of herself with Mariner. Occasionally, and with the aid of alcohol, Jennifer had told Mariner how hard it was being one of the only Andorian kids growing up on Earth, or what it had been like getting into the Academy, or her hopes and dreams for a command of her own someday in the distant future. 

And Mariner would always listen to her stories, and nod at the right times, and ask a few questions to make it look like she was invested. When, in reality, she had been bored.

No. Not bored. Scared. Terrified that, if the moment got too real, or if the sharing grew too deep, then she and Jennifer would be in a relationship. Which would mean sharing her own stories with Jennifer. It would mean making plans further out than the next shift. It would mean meeting families, combining quarters, coordinating schedules. It would become work.

Mariner had been happy to share her present with Jennifer. But she’d never imagined Jennifer as part of her future.

Getting dumped had hurt in the moment. It’d hurt a lot. But the pain hadn’t lasted. Losing her place on the Cerritos, losing her friends, her mother, had hurt infinitely more, drowning out the loss of whatever she and Jennifer had been. 

She had liked being with Jennifer. But Mariner hadn’t missed Jennifer. Mariner had learned to not let herself miss anyone since her Academy days. 

When she tried to imagine hearing I love you coming from Jennifer, she felt panicked. The words made her want to run and hide. They sounded almost like a threat.

“Mariner?”

Shaking her head, Mariner glanced at Jennifer, wondering how long she had stood there in silent thought. “Yeah?”

“I’m… I’m sorry for the way things ended between us,” Jennifer said hesitantly. Then, steeling herself, she said, “I’m sorry for the way I ended things. I was wrong, and it was shitty of me to not believe you.”

Waving off the apology, Mariner said, “Don’t worry about it. If I couldn’t convince my own mother or my friends, there’s no way I was gonna convince my…my, uh…”

As Mariner trailed off awkwardly, Jennifer’s hollow smile returned. “Yeah. Well, I’m still sorry. You deserved better.”

“Thanks,” Mariner said, lips drawn tightly.

Shifting nervously, Jennifer continued, “I, um…I don’t know where you’re at right now, with…um… But if you… I wouldn’t mind… I would really like it if you wanted to give ‘us’ another try,” Jennifer said at last.

Mariner’s guts iced over. “That’s…not where I’m at,” she confessed.

Jennifer nodded, and made an admirable job of hiding her disappointment. But her drooping antennae gave her away. “I understand,” she said.

“But,” Mariner added, “maybe we can stop avoiding each other? We’re on the same shift. It’s way too much effort, especially with a ship this small.” 

A ghost of genuine warmth lit Jennifer’s smile. “I’d like that. It would be nice to walk into the lounge without looking like I’m clearing the room of hostiles,” she admitted, and mimed a few quick tactical movements with an imaginary phaser. 

Mariner chuckled. “Totally.”

When the conversation dwindled into awkward silence, Jennifer rubbed the back of her neck and said, “We heard the news about Brad. We’re all glad he’s going to pull through.” With a moment’s hesitation, she added, “I always thought you seemed close with him. Guess I didn’t realize how close.”

“Bradward Boimler is…” The words burst out of Mariner on reflex, but the normal wit and affable vitriol behind them was nowhere to be found. “...waking up tomorrow,” she finished lamely. 

“Well…tell him Beta Shift can’t wait to have him back. And give him our best,” Jennifer said. As though sensing that the conversation had ended, she began backing in the direction of her bunk. “Good night, Mariner,” she said.

“Night, Jen,” Mariner said, smiling in reflection as she continued to gaze out the window. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched her ex- something awkwardly returning to her bunk, all while the other scattered lower deckers pretended not to watch.

Looking through the nacelles of the Cerritos as it orbited the gleaming blue oceans of Pacifica, Mariner felt hollow. 

It was nice to have finally settled her overdue business with Jennifer. But the conversation, and the memories it elicited, only seemed to confirm what Shaxs had told her. If it hadn’t been the misunderstanding that had gotten Mariner kicked off the ship, something else would have imploded their whatever-they-were. She and Jennifer were never heading for I love you. And that was almost certainly because of Mariner.

“Have you ever said ‘I love you’ to someone like that?” Tendi had asked her.

Her first boyfriend. Her first girlfriend. One or two relationships at the Academy. And since then…no one.

She’d told her friends and her parents that she loved them. And she did. Platonically. Familially. But that raw kind of love, that crazy, stupid, reckless kind, that burned like a star, that felt as irresistible as gravity? It felt like a lifetime had passed since that kind of I love you.

Until Boimler had said it.

She’d missed Boimler when he had left for the Titan. She’d missed him like crazy when she had briefly resigned from Starfleet. Hell, she had missed him all throughout the previous week, to the point where Tendi had been forced to conspire with their superior officers just to trick Mariner into taking a break.

She had spent over two years getting to know Boimler. Being with him never felt like work.

When she heard I love you coming from Boimler, it inspired a different kind of fear in her. It didn’t want to make her run. It paralyzed her. Shocked her. Gutted a part of her she hadn’t felt in years. A part of her she might not have anymore, according to Shaxs.

Turning from the viewport, Mariner left the hallway. In spite of what she had said before, she took the long way around the deck rather than pass by Jennifer’s bunk again. 

She was tired of looking backwards. But she didn’t know where else to go.

Chapter 6: What He Meant To Say

Summary:

Mariner and Boimler clear up a small misunderstanding.

Captain’s Log, Stardate Five-Eight-Nine-Two-Two-Point-One: the refit of Pacifica’s subnautical canals continues on-schedule. Barring any unforeseen complications, we will complete our work in four days’ time. The crew remains dedicated to finishing the job with the level of excellence I’ve come to expect from them. Still, there’s a sort of anticipation toward the end of our time here, and I’m hard-pressed to disagree with the sentiment. I could do without any more complaints about detours and commuter delays coming from bureaucrats whose own government requested the work we’re doing. 

Nevertheless, with the end in sight, morale remains high, especially since today is the day that Lieutenant Boimler will—

BEEP

“Who could that be? Er, computer, pause recording.”

 

---

 

Mariner pulled her thumb from the door chime button, already regretting the decision to press it. She contemplated fleeing down the corridor, but decided against it. Bad enough to be there so early in the morning in the first place. Playing Ding Dong Ditch on her captain and mother would only make the situation worse.

The doors slid apart, revealing Captain Freeman. She wore a pink dressing robe over her slacks and undershirt, drawing it tightly around her as she answered the door. As soon as she saw Mariner, she smirked. “I wondered when it would be my turn,” she said.

“Hilarious,” Mariner grumbled. “Permission to enter?”

Freeman scrunched her nose, either in bemusement or annoyance, or both, and waved Mariner inside. “You’re lucky I’m an early riser. The caffeine is already kicking in” she said, and gestured to a comfortable old chair across from the couch. “Want some?”

“Like a black hole wants ambient matter,” Mariner grunted, and threw herself across the chair, lifting her feet over one armrest and draping her head over the other. 

“Pretty sure it’s the gravity of a black hole that draws in matter, not desire,” Freeman pointed out as she replicated two mugs of coffee.

“Ugh! No physics. Caffeine!” Mariner groaned. 

The worn fabric of the chair still remembered her, and she sank deep into the cushions, relaxing into the feel and smell of the old furniture. Somehow, her mother had kept the chair, and much of her other furnishings, across multiple assignments on different ships. Sane people simply replicated new furniture whenever they moved into new quarters, but her mother had insisted that the old furniture was still perfectly good, and had it transported from ship to ship. As silly as Mariner thought the practice was, she felt glad to have something familiar to comfort her in the moment.

Freeman came back to the couch with their coffees, setting Mariner’s pointedly out of reach on the short glass table between them. “Feet on the floor, please,” she said, and sat.

Groaning again, Mariner rotated and loudly planted her feet on the floor, throwing herself at the mug of coffee. The steam kissed her face as she sipped, sending a warmth splashing down through her body. Melting back into the seat, she sighed with contentment.

“Thank you,” she hummed, wrapping her hands around the mug. As the caffeine woke her drowsy mind, something from at the door caught up with her. “What did you mean, ‘your turn?’” asked Mariner.

Freeman chuckled. “It’s a small ship, Beckett. And senior officers like to gossip too,” she said.

Her contentment evaporated like the steam from her mug, and Mariner groaned a third time. “You’re all too old for that shit.”

“We’re all too old for a lot of things,” Freeman said. Sending a disapproving look over the top of her mug, she added, “Like propositioning the First Officer…”

Mariner twitched. “Wh— I have no idea what you’re talking about. What happened?” she said, and slurped from her mug.

“I caught Jack Ransom looking guilty as hell on my way back to my quarters last night, is what happened. I stopped to say goodnight to him, and he started unloading on me about how my daughter offered to ‘work him out’ in his office,” Freeman said archly. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack, he was talking so fast.”

“I can’t believe he told you! Er, I mean, it wasn’t like that. Or, he’s lying. Or, it was just a prank. Whichever one of those you’ll believe,” Mariner blurted. Then, sullenly, she added, “I wasn’t going to do anything, anyway.”

“That last part, I believe,” Freeman said. “Frankly, I feel like you could both do better than each other.”

“Ouch. Deserved, but ouch,” Mariner admitted. “I…I think I was looking for a bad decision to make. Those, I know how to handle. You just look back over your shoulder at the smoldering wreckage of your life, and then you move forward, leaving it all behind.”

For a moment, Mariner wondered if her mother would riot at her for bludgeoning Ransom with innuendo. Instead, Freeman just kept examining her with an inscrutable look, and said calmly, “So what is it you don’t know how to handle?”

Mariner sank forward, her elbows braced on her knees, as she stared down into her mug. The face she saw rippling in her coffee’s reflection looked tired and sad. 

“What the fuck is wrong with me, Mom?” Mariner sighed. “For real. Shields are down. Fire at will. What is actually happening to me? I feel like I’m going insane. This has never happened to me before.”

“Ohh, it has,” Freeman said. When her daughter shot her a surprised look, she savored it with a long sip of coffee. Then she swallowed, hummed appreciatively, and said, “Ricky Mateo.”

Mariner frowned in bafflement. “My boyfriend on the Enterprise ? We were fourteen. It lasted, like, five months.”

“That’s how long it lasted,” Freeman agreed. “But you seem to be forgetting how it started.”

A carefully buried deposit of Mariner’s memories exploded to the surface in a geyser of embarrassing moments that she had managed to avoid for almost twenty years. Heat climbed up Mariner’s face all the way to her hairline as she blushed and moaned, “No…”

“Oh, yes,” Freeman retorted, and leaned back into the couch with a wistful faraway look. “You took all the same classes. You played on the same Parrises Squares team. You beat the hell out of each other in Anbo-jyutsu. For about a year, all I heard from you was when ‘Ricky said this,’ or when ‘Ricky did that.’ ‘He stole the game-winning point from me, Mom! I was wide open, but he wouldn’t pass!’” Freeman smirked as she affected a high-pitched whine.

Mariner’s face blazed. “He almost missed that shot. It could have cost us the match,” she grumbled under her breath.

“I was relieved when he finally asked you out. Silly me, I thought dealing with you ‘dating’ would be easier than dealing with you ‘almost-dating.’ And do you remember what you did when he invited you to the holodeck?” Freeman said.

All of the blood in Mariner’s body had rushed to her face at this point. “I punched him in the nose,” she admitted. When her mother’s expression turned smug, she exclaimed, “It wasn’t my fault! He wanted me to be the sidekick in that dumb espionage holonovel that was popular back then! It was something about sneakers?”

“Nick Sneaker? As in The Sneaker Conspiracy ?” Freeman laughed. “Your father and I ran that program together. Now I’m glad you punched him. That one gets a little too ’steamy’ for teenagers.”

Shocked, Mariner said, “It does? Damn it! I would have jumped into the holodeck if I knew that! It took me two more weeks to get Ricky to kiss me. I had to walk in the arboretum looking at stupid trees for an hour until he finally made a move!”

Freeman laughed hard enough to spill coffee all over her robe. “After you punched him, you’re lucky he didn’t hide in a Jeffries tube every time he saw you coming. I know I would have.”

“Fine, whatever,” Mariner said, trying to will the embarrassment out of her face. “I was an idiot. What does that have to do with right now?”

“Because you’re still an idiot,” Freeman told her. When Mariner shot her a dirty look, she lifted her hands and said, “Hey. Shields down, weapons free, remember? And don’t take it so hard. There’s no age limit on being an idiot.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” Mariner snapped. “Punch Boimler?”

“Maybe try inviting him to the holodeck first,” Freeman suggested.

“I’m serious!” exploded Mariner. “He’s my best friend! He’s not supposed to tell me he loves me!”

“So, you don’t like him like that,” said Freeman. “So tell him. It’ll be awkward at first, but—”

“I do like him!” 

Freeman recoiled in surprise at her daughter’s shout. “Oh.”

Mariner felt even more surprised by her own words, but she was already steamrolling past them. “I like how funny he is when he isn’t trying to be! I like that he gets excited about the same Starfleet shit as I do! I like that he’s ‘Ride or Die’ all the time, even when he’s scared! I like his stupid poofy purple pompadour! And his eyes! God, his eyes are so freaking blue!” she snarled, and clutched at her temples. “I never looked twice at his stupid eyes before, but ever since he said it, I can’t stop thinking about them!”

“So tell him,” Freeman insisted.

“I can’t!” bellowed Mariner.

“Why not?” shouted Freeman.

“Because I’m going to ruin it!” Mariner roared. “I’ve fucked up everything else in my life, so why would this be any different? I’m going to drive him away, and we won’t even be friends anymore! There! Are you happy?”

Furious, Mariner looked around for something to get her hands on. Seemingly recognizing the look, Freeman calmly handed her one of the throw pillows from the couch, which Mariner immediately flung at the viewport. The plush purple square thwumped against the transparent aluminum and dropped to the floor.

Sulking, Mariner folded her arms and slouched deeper into her chair.

After a beat of silence, Freeman collected the second throw pillow from the couch and offered it to her. “Want the other one?”

Mariner snatched the pillow, hugging this one to her chest instead of flinging it. 

“You have not ruined everything in your life. Stop being dramatic,” Freeman chided her.

Rolling her eyes, Mariner said, “Oh, please. When I first got here, you were desperate to get rid of me because I was such a screw-up. You wanted me out of Starfleet so bad, I could feel the discharge paperwork hanging over me like a guillotine.”

“I wanted you to transfer off my ship,” Freeman said defensively.

“Same thing,” sneered Mariner. “As if any other ship wouldn’t airlock me five minutes after I got there. We both knew I was on my way out anyway. You even tried to recruit Boimler to spy on me.”

Freeman stared down into her coffee without reply. Mariner was used to seeing her mother speechless in any number of states of annoyance or apoplexy. She rarely saw her mother struck dumb with guilt.

Slowly, a tiny smile crept into Freeman’s lips. “Do you know why I picked Boimler to spy on you?” she asked.

Tightening her arms around the pillow, Mariner mumbled, “Because I used to get myself assigned to duties with him so he’d do all the work. Duh.”

“Nope,” said Freeman. “Hadn’t paid attention to him enough to even notice that. I knew his type though: boot-licking, obsequious, ladder-climbing overachiever. Did you know that Academy Security had to forbid him from filing any new reports with them? They got sick of him calling every time someone snuck alcohol into the dormitories or stayed out ten minutes past curfew. Called him ‘The Universe’s Snitchiest Cadet.’”

Mariner uncurled herself from around the pillow, laughing. “They did not! Snitchiest? That’s not even a word!”

Lifting her palm, Freeman swore, “My hand to God: ‘Snitchiest Cadet,’ right there in his file. I thought I could get him to squeal on you in a heartbeat.” Her smirk widened. “But I couldn’t even get a full day of spying out of him. He clammed up right after that second contact mission with the Galardonians, when I knew you were up to something on that away team.”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Mariner lied, affecting a bored expression.

“Which is more or less what he said, with that exact face,” Freeman said wryly. “I started to pay attention after that. To both of you.”

Mariner scoffed. “Yeah, I felt it. Believe me.”

“When Ransom came to me and said he wanted to promote you again, I thought it would be a disaster. I figured you’d make it a week before you crashed and burned, like when I made you the Senior Ops Officer,” admitted Freeman.

“Something else we both knew I’d screw up,” noted Mariner.

Her gaze dropped back into her coffee, and Freeman nodded. “But it’s been different this time. I was wrong about you, Beckett. I’m sorry.”

Guiltily, Mariner squirmed in her seat and buried her chin in the pillow she hugged to her chest. “Yeah, well…historically, you weren’t wrong. One anomalous data point doesn’t invalidate all the other ones.”

“It’s different,” insisted Freeman. “You’re different. And so is Boimler. I wouldn’t have promoted that weasley ensign who lied to my face. But I’m proud of the officer Boimler has become. Ransom tells me that a lot of that change in him is because of you.”

“I may have taught him everything he knows,” Mariner admitted, feigning humility.

Snorting, Freeman added, “And I can’t help but wonder why I started noticing changes in you after you and he got close.”

Snarkily, Mariner said, “Correlation is not causation, Captain. That’s, like, the first thing they teach you in science.”

“No,” Freeman allowed, “but if I was a gambler, I wouldn’t bet against the two of you. Not for all the latinum in the galaxy.”

“Not a huge risk coming from someone in a post-scarcity socialist utopia,” Mariner retorted. But as her mother’s knowing smile persisted, Mariner felt herself curling up, lifting her heels up to twine herself around the throw pillow at her chest.

Sighing, Freeman set her coffee back on the table, and then stood. She perched herself on the armrest of Mariner’s chair and placed her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Beckett,” she said gently, “I’ve watched you mouth off to flag officers. I’ve seen you go AWOL so you could pick up contraband, which you then lied about having while holding it. I even heard that you once got a boy to kiss you in the arboretum two weeks after you punched him in the face.” 

Scrunching more tightly, Mariner mumbled, “That’s a great summary of my most embarrassing failures. Thanks for that.”

“My point,” Freeman said, “is that you’ve never been afraid of going for what you wanted, damn the consequences. So why should this be any different?”

Shrinking deeper into her seat, Mariner murmured, “Because I don’t want him to leave again.”

But her mother just squeezed her shoulder. “Then don’t let him.”

It wasn’t that simple, Mariner knew. Boimler had almost died on the Nautilus. He had actually died on Corazonia. He’d left for the Titan. 

But that was Starfleet life. Here one moment, and gone the next. She and her mother both understood that better than most. 

Keep him around as long as you can, is what she really meant.

Mariner buried her face in the pillow. “Why does anything have to change? I finally, FINALLY liked the way things were,” she moaned.

A soft hand began to stroke her hair, and Mariner froze. She couldn’t remember her mother doing that since she’d hit a double-digit age and become a living terror. 

“Everything always changes, Beckett,” her mother said. “We just have to make the best out of the changes, and hope it’s enough. So tell him how you feel. Or tell him you don’t know how you feel. And have a little faith that he won’t abandon you when things get messy. As near as I can figure, you’re both messes, and you have been since the start.” And she smiled.

Reluctantly, Mariner lifted her gaze up. With her mother looming above her, stroking her head, she felt suddenly, embarrassingly childish. And she didn’t care. “Why are you being so cool to me?” she asked. “I’ve been a walking disaster this week. You could have jumped down my throat, and nobody would have thought twice about it, including me.”

Freeman’s eyes wobbled, and her hand came to rest at the nape of Mariner’s neck. “Because five days ago, you almost died. And less than a month ago, you were trying to kill yourself.”

Mariner’s stomach lurched. Her struggle to survive on Sherbal V, and her subsequent adventure single-handedly dismantling Nick Locarno’s idiotic Nova Fleet—with a timely rescue from her mother and the Cerritos, maybe—had forced her to face a lot of demons in her past. Before that, with no unreasonable authority figure to defy, or unfair decisions to oppose, her coping mechanism had been to throw herself into every dangerous situation she could find, or to manufacture danger where none existed. It hadn’t been the healthiest way of dealing with her past.

“I wasn’t—” Mariner started to protest.

“And less than three months ago,” Freeman continued over her, “I threw you off my ship.” Her voice broke, and tears rimmed her eyes.

“Mom…” Mariner uncoiled herself to rest a hand on her mother’s leg. “We’re cool now. I forgave you, remember?”

“You did. I didn’t,” Freeman said huskily. Swiping at her eyes, she settled her captainly facade back into place. “So your captain will jump down your throat some other week. Right now, your mother just wants you to be okay.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Mariner said, smiling. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the PADD on the coffee table with a half-finished log entry on its display. “Hey, you got to delete another one of your letters after all,” she noted brightly.

Freeman chuckled. “Worked like a charm,” she bragged. 

Noting the time on the PADD’s chronometer readout, Mariner felt her stomach lurch with the same dread that had kept her up all night. “I think Boimler should be awake by now,” she said.

Nodding, Freeman rose from the arm of the chair, collecting her and Mariner’s cold coffee mugs. “I suppose so. Are you gonna see him now, or…”

Mariner reflexively curled around the pillow again.

Rolling her eyes, Freeman said, “...or I can come with you to sickbay. I should congratulate Mister Boimler on his recovery anyway.”

“I’d like that,” Mariner admitted.

Shaking her head in exaggerated disgust, Freeman grumbled, “It’s Ricky Mateo all over again. Come on. Let’s get some breakfast in you before we go.”

“I’ll just grab another coffee,” Mariner insisted. Her roiling stomach warned her against any food.

“Uh-uh. If you just have more coffee, you’ll crash in a couple hours. You need real food,” Freeman told her.

Mariner grinned as she rose from the chair and followed to the replicator. “Yes, mother,” she said in a sing-song tone.

 

---

 

Jittery with nerves and coffee, and with half a scone in her quaking stomach, Mariner followed the captain into sickbay. The privacy curtain around the surgical alcove was gone, but in its place stood a wall of nurses. Their blue uniforms proved just as effective at blocking Mariner’s view as a holographic wall.

Doctor T’Ana stood several meters back from the alcove, making herself an effective second barrier against Tendi and Rutherford, who had beaten Mariner and Freeman to sickbay, and stood corralled behind T’Ana’s outstretched arms. T'Lyn stood back from the squabble, content to observe, but presumably also there to see Boimler.

“--or because I fucking said so. Take your pick, but that last one is my favorite,” T’Ana told the trio.

“Aw, come on! We won’t get in the way,” Rutherford whined, trying and failing to slip past T’Ana. “And we won’t infect him with anything. We’re super-clean!”

“Especially by the lax standards of Starfleet protocol, my hygiene is unassailable,” T'Lyn agreed.

“The sterilization field will protect him from you three germy idiots,” T’Ana growled. “But right now, he’s being run through a cognitive test. We need to make sure nothing in his noodle got cooked away while he was under.”

“And you’re letting Nurse Thorg do it?” Tendi said, horrified. “Thorg couldn’t find his butt with all six claws and a tricorder! Let me do it instead! Please! I still remember how!” she insisted, trying to reach over T’Ana’s arm as if she could stretch across sickbay all the way to the alcove.

Freeman’s expression transitioned into one of good-natured authority as she stepped ahead of Mariner and said, “Stand down, Lieutenants. Give the doctor a little elbow room.”

Rutherford and Tendi jumped at her order, while T'Lyn turned with mild interest. Guiltily, Rutherford rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Sorry, Captain, we just—”

“No need to apologize, Mister Rutherford,” the captain assured him. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad to see the three of you here. I’ve been meaning to congratulate you all on your heroic act to save the passengers of the Nautilus.”

Immediately, Mariner recognized her mother’s flattering patter as it spun into motion. Captain Freeman began effusively praising their work, and their dedication, and any other keywords on which to compliment them. Mariner had seen any one of her captains fill the space between silences with identical word salads that sounded nice and meant little.

But with a second look, Mariner noticed that her friends were focused on their captain instead of trying to end-run around T’Ana. Maybe her old mom was a better leader than Mariner had realized.

As her attention drifted, she mentally filtered the sound of her mother’s monologizing, and the white noise of sickbay, and the soft voices of the nurses in the alcove. And finally, she was able to hear it:

Boimler’s voice.

It was soft, and hoarse. Faint and breathy, as though speaking cost him more effort than it was worth. She couldn’t make out the individual words as he responded to the nurses’ cognitive test. But she heard him.

The hairs on her neck prickled.

“Hey.” No longer needing to guard her patient, T’Ana sidled next to Mariner, speaking in a prison yard whisper so as not to break the captain’s spell over the others. “Good job staying away. I know it’s hard for you to not go where you’re not wanted.”

“Bite me,” Mariner retorted, equally soft.

“Oh, hey now,” T’Ana said, and lifted her PADD, “that’s mean. And here I was thinking I would get you assigned to sickbay for the next few days. Ransom said you needed new scutwork, and there’s plenty of that here.”

“Very funny. We both know I’m not rated for medical work,” Mariner said, rolling her eyes at the empty threat. But when T’Ana just kept staring ahead impassively, Mariner frowned. “Right?” she insisted.

T’Ana gave her a side-eye and murmured, “Boimler’s gonna need about five days of physical therapy. Nothing intense: muscle stimulation, nerve calibration, standard stuff. But he’s a crybaby, which means someone needs to hold his hand and tell him what a special boy he is. And since I would rather kill myself, you can do it instead.”

Mariner blinked in disbelief. “Are you actually being nice?” she whispered.

“Go fuck yourself. Besides, it’s not all fun and games. Since you aren’t good for anything useful around here, pretty much the only real work you can do is operating the medical transporter to beam out his piss and shit,” T’Ana said, laughing under her breath.

“Ha, ha,” Mariner muttered.

“If you’d rather do it analog, say the word. I’ll replicate a fresh bedpan,” T’Ana retorted.

Mariner didn’t answer. She studied T’Ana out of the corner of her eye, and saw the long hours of the past week written in the Caitian’s drooping whiskers, in her matted fur, and in the bags under her eyes that were heavier than ever before.

Leaning closer, Mariner whispered to T’Ana, “Take Shaxs on a picnic.”

This made T’Ana whirl on her. “The fuck did you just say to me?” she demanded.

“Take Shaxs on a picnic,” she repeated. “Our upcoming leave on Karisstaria. They’re supposed to have these crystalline forests in the…” Where were they? “The southern hemisphere. Big jewel trees. I hear they’re awesome.”

“Why the fuck would I take him on a picnic?” T’Ana hissed, bewildered.

Meeting T’Ana’s scowl with a calm smile, Mariner murmured, “Because Shaxs is a nice guy. And nice guys deserve picnics.”

The fur around T’Ana’s face bristled as she rose up and jabbed a claw at Mariner’s face. “If you ever—ever—stick your nose in my business again, you’ll need me to grow you a new one. And I just redid Boimler’s nose, so I’ve had the practice,” she growled.

Mariner smirked as the stocky Caitian hissed at her and slunk back a step, where she made a big show of studying her PADD. 

A beat later, T’Ana muttered, “You said the southern hemisphere, right? Jewel trees?”

“Mmhmm,” hummed Mariner.

“Good. I’ll be sure to avoid them when I’m getting plastered in some filthy bar with the rest of the adults,” T’Ana grumbled as she typed something into her PADD.

One of the nurses raised a claw and motioned for T’Ana, who nodded in reply. Conveniently, Captain Freeman’s praise of her lieutenants wrapped up just in time for the doctor to lead them all toward the surgical alcove.

The group of nurses cleared out, hauling carts and trays filled with equipment around the Captain and her small gaggle. Tendi lifted a nervous hand to the clawed nurse and said, “Uh, hi, Thorg! Working hard, or hardly working? Heh…”

Thorg raised a middle claw to Tendi as he shambled past her on his other five limbs.

“I deserved that,” Tendi said, nodding. Brightly, she called after him, “Let’s get drinks sometime!”

From a passing cart, Mariner palmed a small device without catching the notice of the nurse who pushed it. She slipped it into her pocket and, with a deep breath, stepped into the alcove.

Boimler was alive, and awake, and…pink. Most of him was hidden beneath a white medical sheet spread across the surgical bed. The shape beneath the sheet suggested that all of him was there, if somewhat diminished. His arms were gaunt and thin, and his cheeks were hollow. Only a faint dusting of purple stubble covered his scalp and where his eyebrows should have been. 

And every inch of him was pink. Pink, pink, pink skin, bordering on the raw red color of a newborn baby, so fresh that it could only have been troweled onto him mere hours before. There must have been nothing left of his original skin, Mariner realized. Yet she still recognized him as he smiled weakly at their approach.

“Hey, guys! It’s good to— Captain!” When he saw Freeman, Boimler tried to prop himself up into some wobbly form of attention.

T’Ana pressed a palm to his forehead and pushed him back onto the biobed. “Easy, tiger,” she cautioned him. “Those new muscles I installed couldn’t lift a wet sack of farts, let alone your melon head. We gotta build you back up first.”

“At ease, Mister Boimler,” the captain added. “We’ll have you back on duty in no time. But for the moment, I just wanted to say: well done.

Blood rushed into Boimler’s cheeks, his capillaries visible in the raw synthiderm. “Thank you, Captain. But I was just part of a team.”

“Yeah, the part that exploded!” Rutherford exclaimed. “You gotta stop doing that, man. It’s not healthy.”

“I did the best I could. Once I triggered the overload in engineering control, I tried to dive into a part of the open deck that’d dislodged, hoping it would shield me from the worst of it.”

“Aw, man, you jumped from the explosion? So cool!” gushed Rutherford.

“Pretty smart,” Tendi agreed. “That’s probably what saved your life.”

His cheeks strained as his smile grew, and he looked around, from Tendi, to Rutherford, and T'Lyn, and finally, to Mariner. His eyes lingered on her, warm and fond. “I know who saved my life,” he told them all.

“Yeah. Me,” groused T’Ana. She paired her PADD to the biobed, calling up a readout from his monitors, and pulling the nursing team’s updates on his charts. “Your vitals are good, and it looks like you passed the cognitive testing with flying colors. How’s everything feeling?”

Squirming, Boimler admitted, “It’s weird. Kind of feels like I’m wearing a new uniform that doesn’t quite fit. Only, it’s not a uniform. It’s my skin.”

T’Ana nodded. “That’s your brain looking for the nerves that got roasted out of you. We’ll synchronize you with the new inputs, and that feeling will subside—“

“Oh, good,” sighed Boimler.

“—or you’ll have a psychotic episode and tear the flesh off your bones,” T’Ana finished.

“…oh, good?” squeaked Boimler.

The doctor reached across him and pressed a hypospray to his neck. “Alright, that’s enough chitchat. Your body needs rest.”

Boimler settled back on the bed. “But I just spent the week unconscious,” he protested.

“You spent the week in a coma being re-fucking-built,” T’Ana corrected him. “Your brain needs real sleep, and your body needs to heal from everything I put it through raising you from the dead, Frankenstein.”

Tendi gently squeezed his arm. “It’s okay, Boimler. We’ll come back after you’ve had some rest. Maybe we could bring a game!”

“Yeah! Something fun!” Rutherford agreed.

“I will also return,” T'Lyn chimed in, “though I will not bring anything that may be considered ‘fun.’ Perhaps instead I could brief you on the progress of the canal project on the planet’s surface.”

“Yes. To all of that,” Boimler agreed. “Thanks, guys. You’re the best.”

His gaze fell back to Mariner, and his hairless brow furrowed. It was only then that Mariner realized she had yet to say anything to him. She had been staring with an unreadable expression that seemed to confuse Boimler. 

As if sensing their wordless exchange, Freeman made a subtle motion to the other lieutenants. “I think we should leave Mister Boimler to rest. Don’t hurt yourself hurrying your recovery, Lieutenant. There’s always more work waiting for you when you’re ready.”

Then Freeman ushered away the other three visitors, pointedly leaving Mariner behind.

Smirking, T’Ana reached above the biobed and pressed a control. The privacy curtain shimmered into existence around the alcove again, and this time Mariner was on the inside as it dampened the ambient noise of sickbay behind the glowing, opaque blue holographic wall.

“He’ll be asleep for most of the day,” T’Ana said to Mariner. “You can report to sickbay tomorrow for your first shift. Until then, you’re on bedrest too. You look like shit. And don’t go running to Ransom about it this time. I chewed his ass off after he disregarded that medical leave I recommended for you. You weasel out of it again, and I’ll stun you and throw you onto a biobed myself.”

Drowsily, Boimler stirred at the doctor’s leaving. “Wait, your shift? Medical leave? What’s she talking about?” he asked Mariner.

“You kids play nice,” T’Ana said, her voice sickly sweet as she vanished through the privacy curtain.

Behind the curtain, in the sound-dampened alcove, Mariner and Boimler were completely alone. Even the ambient murmur of the Cerritos’s engines fell silent. It was as though they had been jettisoned, and were adrift in a quiet universe all of their own.

Boimler fidgeted beneath her gaze. “Mariner? Are you okay?” he asked.

In reply, Mariner drew the stolen device from her pocket, gripping it tightly at her side.

“Uh…is that a dermal regenerator?” Boimler said, glancing at the device.

“Are you going to admit it?” she said, her voice sounding distant in her own ears. It was hard to hear herself above the thunderous heartbeat pounding in her chest.

“Admit what?” asked Boimler, perplexed.

“That you rehearsed all of those speeches to us before you blew up,” said Mariner.

His puzzled frown deepened. “What?”

Mariner’s hand shot forward, and she landed a powerful flick of one finger squarely on Boimler’s upper arm. He yelped and tried to recoil, but the limited space of the biobed forestalled any retreat.

“Admit it,” she warned him, raising her tensed finger to threaten another blow.

“What are you talking about?” he whined.

She flicked him again.

“Ow-w-w-w-w-w!” Boimler whimpered, clutching his arm. “Mariner, come on! This skin is brand new, and it’s tender! I’m bruising like a peach!”

“You do that anyway. Now admit it,” she said.

“Fine! I admit it!” he huffed, rubbing at his arm. “I thought of it all ahead of time!”

He flinched as Mariner reached for him again. This time, though, her touch was gentle as she lifted his hand away from the arm and raised her device to the injury. Soft blue light from the dermal regenerator began to cool the welts blossoming in his pink skin.

Mariner kept her eyes on the bruises, unable to meet his watery blue gaze. “You practice what you want to say to people in case you die? That is messed up, man,” she grunted.

Huffing, Boimler retorted, “Dying on Corazonia kind of made me think about stuff like that. I thought it’d be nice if my last words weren’t ‘I’m wetting my pants in fear!’ So I…” He sagged, sinking deeper into the thin cushion with embarrassment. “Every away mission, I think about what I’d say to the other people on the team if I…y’know…”

She snorted, and patted the freshly healed skin of his arm. “Well, you nailed it with everyone else, but I think you could have elaborated on mine a little more,” she grunted.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Mariner’s stomach went into freefall. She stared at him, looking carefully for any hint of a joke or a lie. But he looked back at her with such genuine confusion that it beggared belief. “Are you telling me you don’t remember?” she exclaimed.

“Uh…” His eyes danced back and forth as if reading through his memories. “The actual moments leading up to, um, ‘kaboom’ are a little fuzzy. But I remember what I practiced. Why? Did I say something bad?”

For half a heartbeat, Mariner contemplated lying to him. She could tell Boimler whatever she wanted. Make the whole thing into a joke, and bury all those complicated feelings behind one stupid little white lie. 

But it was a small ship. Gossip, especially the juicy kind, tended to linger. Besides, he could always look up his actual transmission in the ship’s logs. 

And her mother was right. Mariner had never been afraid of going for something she wanted.

“You told me you love me,” Mariner said.

His eyes went wide. “I did?” Then they went wider still. “Holy shit, I did!”

Mariner couldn’t decide if she wanted to laugh or beat him to death with the dermal regenerator. Ultimately, she decided that the latter would be too ironic a fate to inflict on him, and settled on the former. “You asshole,” she chuckled hollowly, and sank her face into her hand. 

“No, no, I’m sorry!” he said quickly, presuming—almost correctly—that Mariner might start raining blows on him. “I remember now. I had less than two seconds before the remaining power breached the warp core. And I didn’t have enough time before I had to overload my station to say what I’d practiced in my head. So I…panicked?”

“You panicked,” Mariner echoed. Behind her hand, she could feel her eyes growing hot. But she would be damned before Bradward Boimler saw her cry because of him. Then she really would have to kill him. And she felt too tired for that. “So you didn’t mean what you said.”

All of that worry. A week of indecision. And he had never meant to say I love you.

“No. I mean yes! I mean…” His words crashed into each other as he talked too quickly, choking himself with too many thoughts at once. Taking a deep breath, he said, “There wasn’t enough time to say what I wanted to say. So I guess my brain just…condensed it.”

“So then what were you going to say?” she asked. When she pulled her hand from her face, her features were carefully stony. “Before you had to ‘condense’ it?”

He sank deeper beneath the blanket, as if he could simply vanish under the covers. “It’s… I mean, it kind of sounds silly if I’m not about to die.”

“You still could be,” she told him, and threatened him with another finger-flick.

“Okay, okay!” he said, lifting his hands in surrender. 

Mariner relented, folding her arms as she watched and waited. Beneath her paper-thin facade, her insides were churning.

A shaky breath rattled through Boimler’s chest. Trembling, he lifted his gaze to hers, and said, “Mariner, you are my best friend. And one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.”

“One of?” she repeated, raising an eyebrow.

“Be quiet. I’m dying over here,” Boimler said. Then he continued, “You are brilliant, and fearless. You don’t let anything stand in your way. It’s terrifying to watch sometimes, but it’s also incredible. Like seeing a supernova coming straight at you, and knowing there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I do like being compared to stellar destruction,” she said approvingly.

Wheezing a single laugh, he kept going. “You’re also insufferable, pig-headed, jaded, and kind of an asshole. You always have to get the last word, even when you’re wrong. Especially when you’re wrong. Which is often.”

She snorted. “Now you’re just making stuff up on the spot,” she accused him.

But he shook his head. His smile dwindled as he looked up at her, and his hoarse voice softened. “But you’re a million other things, too. You’re funny. And even though you think you’ve seen it all, you’re still curious in the way an explorer needs to be. And you’re kind. A little mean about it, but really, really kind. You try to act like you don’t care about anyone or anything, but I know that isn’t true. You just care too much. So much that it’s hurt you before. Which is why you pretend.”

Mariner swallowed, and said nothing.

God damn it. His eyes were so blue.

“You keep everyone at a distance so you don’t get hurt anymore. So nobody sees the real you. But you let me get close enough to see it, at least a little bit.” He swallowed hard. “I don’t really know why you let me get that close. But I’m really glad you did. I wish…”

She bit her lip.

Blinking hard, Boimler rasped, “I wish I had more time to see that side of you. I wish I had more time with you, period. We’d see who we became together. Which one of us got to be Number One, and which one got to be the Captain—”

“Me,” Mariner interjected hoarsely. “Me, I’d be Captain. Captain is me.”

“But in the end, I don’t think it would have mattered,” he continued, his grin flashing at her interruption. “Because it would have been you and me. And we could have been…” His voice broke, and he drew a shuddering breath. “We would have had some great adventures together.”

As he drew silent, Mariner rubbed at her eyes again, wiping away tears before they could fall. “That, uh… All of that was just for me?” she asked shakily. “I can see why you had to condense it.” 

“It just kept getting longer every time I practiced it,” he admitted. “I edited out a whole part about how you got me into trouble, but the good kind of trouble, and you taught me how great it can be to take a chance on something, even when it seems crazy.”

“Well, don’t get rid of that! That’s gold!” Mariner laughed as she sniffled and swiped at her eyes. 

“It’s a work in progress,” he said, “as long as I remain, y’know, ‘in progress.’”

No matter how hard she pressed, her tears remained. Fuck it. Lowering her hands, she said, “Boims, do you love me?”

He was little better, dragging his spindly arm across his face. A wet smear lingered across his rosy pink cheeks. “Duh. Obviously,” he said through shaky laughter. “You’re my best friend. And I’m the only one around here keeping all your bad ideas in check.”

“Boimler,” Mariner said, dropping her smile, “do you ‘love’ me?”

His expression collapsed. He went still under the blanket, not breathing, not blinking. Mariner might have feared she’d killed him with the question, if his eyes weren’t darting back and forth across her tear-streaked face.

Finally, he heaved a sigh and turned his head away. “Come on, Mariner,” he mumbled.

“Uh-uh. No. You don’t get to ‘Come on, Mariner,’ me,” she snapped. “You said that shit, and then you exploded, and I’ve spent the last week losing my mind about it. Now it’s your turn.”

The laughter was gone. The tears remained. His jaw clenched, the bone stark against the thin synthiderm as it worked back and forth. Finally, he said, “Yeah. I’m pretty sure I do.”

“Pretty sure?” she cried. 

Shooting her an annoyed glance, he retorted, “There wasn’t a warning light that went off in my head about it, Mariner! One day, I thought you were just my best friend, and the next, I realized that I…I wanted something more.”

So at some point, things had changed for him too. “Then you haven’t just been pretending to be my friend all along? So you can sleep with me?” Mariner said cautiously.

Boimler blinked. Then he began to wheeze violently, and clutched his chest. Mariner darted forward, terrified that he might be dying, before she realized that he was laughing at her.

“Oh, my God,” he gasped, squeezing his ribs as though they would burst through his skin. “Oh, God, it hurts to laugh… That’s cheating, Mariner…”

“It’s not that funny,” she said. But even she grinned.

That only made him wheeze harder. A moment later, when he’d laughed a fresh set of tears across his face and finally caught his breath, he rasped, “Mariner, don’t take this the wrong way, but the sex would have to be mind-blowing to put up with you if I weren’t your friend. Literally mind-blowing. Like, you would have to be a Deltan.”

“Heh. Ain’t no Oath of Celibacy on my record,” she agreed. “But come on, I had to ask. I am the hottest person on the ship.”

“You don’t even make my top five,” he retorted, smirking.

She leaned her elbows onto his biobed, hovering above him with a smug smirk of her own. “Oh, please. You couldn’t name five people hotter than…” She paused, and then admitted, “Okay, there’s Barnes. She is crazy hot.”

“Barnes,” Boimler agreed, and then added, “Jet.”

Mariner sighed and bobbed her head. “Yes, fine. Jet’s a hunk.”

“Anya,” said Boimler.

“Of course you would like Anya,” Mariner said, rolling her eyes.

“...T'Lyn.”

Mariner gasped, grabbing his arm. “Shut up! Seriously?” She wiggled her eyebrows, and teased, “You know, I’ve heard about these temples they have on Vulcan…”

He shoved weakly at her and coughed another laugh. “You said hottest, not most eligible.”

“Okay, Cassanova. Who’s number five?” Mariner pressed. Her hand lingered on his arm.

After a moment’s thought, he announced, “Sri’lak.”

“What?” Mariner guffawed.

“What?” he said, his face shining red with embarrassment again. “She’s so tall. And I like her ganglia.”

She snickered and imagined Boimler teetering on his tiptoes to reach Sri’lak’s mouth with his. Then she frowned, and said, “Is it weird that neither of us said ‘Tendi?’”

Boimler shook his head. “No. Whenever I try to think of her like that, my brain just adds ‘and Rutherford’ to the end of the thought.”

“Let me try,” she said, and cleared her throat. “‘Hey, there’s my friend, Tendi.’ ‘Hey, check out that smoking hot Orion, Tendi! …and Rutherford.’ Damn, you’re right!”

“Like the proton and the neutron that makes up deuterium. They just go together,” Boimler agreed.

They chuckled. It felt good to slip into familiar roles, batting an idea back and forth that made them both laugh. But the laughter didn’t last, and stranded them in an awkward silence as they fought to not look at each other. Still, Mariner’s touch remained on his arm.

“I’m sorry you found out like this, Mariner,” Boimler said at last. “Actually, I’m sorry you found out at all. I was planning on taking this to the grave, I swear.” The red color deepened in his cheeks, and Mariner realized that his embarrassment had turned to shame.

Scrunching her nose, Mariner said, “Yeah, well, you kind of told everyone. Like, everybody on the ship.”

His eyes bugged, and he coughed, “What?”

“Dude, you were broadcasting on the emergency channel. The bridge picked it up,” Mariner reminded him.

“Oh, no,” Boimler said, stuffing his face into his hands. “Oh, no, no, no! No wonder you were mad. I am so sorry, Mariner.”

“I’m not mad,” Mariner said. “At least, not at you. There’s a couple of gossips I wouldn’t mind stuffing into a storage locker. But that’s not your fault.”

“And the Captain was here! If she had said anything…” he moaned into his hands. When his arms gave out and flopped to either side of him, he looked up at her with sunken eyes, and said, “No wonder you were freaking out all week. Look, Mariner, once I’m out of sickbay, I swear, I’ll set everybody straight. Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it.”

“Boims,” Mariner tried to interject.

But his anxious stammering had gathered too much momentum to stop. “I guess we don’t have to wait until I’m out of sickbay. Maybe the Captain will let me make an announcement to the crew? No, that’s just as embarrassing for you. A statement? If you bring me a PADD, I’ll draft something up, and if it looks good to you, we can circulate it—”

“Bradward,” Mariner snapped, pounding on the consonants of his name to silence him. 

His lips snapped shut. 

Her fingertips trailed up his arm, his neck, his face, and smoothed the wrinkles in his hairless brow. He blazed like a furnace under her touch. 

Gently, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I mean…are you really going to make me say it?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he scoffed, and said, “I didn’t want you to make fun of me. Or worse, look at me like…that. Like you’re doing right now. I didn’t want you to pity me,” he rasped, and twisted his face away from her.

She didn’t try to pull him back. But neither did she budge. “It’s not pity,” she told him.

“Please. We both know I’m not your type,” he said bitterly.

“I have sixteen types. Don’t pigeonhole me,” she said.

Slowly, as if terrified of her placid gaze, Boimler turned his face back to her. “Mariner, what…wh-what are you saying?” he said, trembling.

Her lips felt bone dry. She licked them, and swallowed, and said, “I’m saying that I might. Feel that way, I mean. About you.”

“I don’t…understand…” he said, dazed. His eyes flickered, as though he couldn’t trust what they saw in her hesitant, hopeful smile.

“Yeah, me neither,” she said, snorting a quiet laugh. “But I just spent a week freaking out, wondering why you said ‘that’ to me, and then trying to figure out why the hell it freaked me out in the first place. And the only answer I could come up with was, maybe it’s not as insane as it sounds. Maybe there’s something there.”

“...you’re serious?” he said, his voice cracking.

Mariner took his gaunt hand in hers, threading their fingers together. She could feel his pulse racing through the thin skin of his palm. “What was that I taught you? Taking a chance on something can be great, even if it seems crazy? Well, nothing seems crazier to me than this.”

And she squeezed his hand. Her heart leapt in her chest when she felt him squeezing back.

“But it feels pretty great,” she admitted.

As she watched, the disbelief melted out of his features, and a raw grin emerged in its place. His rasping breath shook, and she felt a tremor in their clasped hands. Those capillaries in his cheeks blazed bright red again.

He was nervous. That only made Mariner smile harder, and think, So am I.

The sincerity threatened to overwhelm her, so Mariner cleared her throat, and patted Boimler’s hand still clasped in hers. “Okay. Ground rules,” she said. “Rule One: no calling me your ‘girlfriend.’ If I hear that word, I promise I’ll freak out and jump into an escape pod.”

His head settled back onto the biobed’s cushion, but his wobbly eyes never left her face. “Can I call myself your boyfriend?” he asked.

“Hell no,” she teased. “You can refer to yourself as my toy, plaything, flavor of the month, huge mistake, or simply ‘Mariner’s.’”

“You got it, snookums,” he murmured.

She snorted, and said, “Rule Two: no pet names. They’re gross.”

“Can I call you ‘Becky?’”

Sighing, Mariner rubbed his hand tenderly, and said, “Dude, T’Ana just grew these new bones for you. It would suck if I had to break them all again so soon. Don’t make more work for her.”

“Boo.”

“Rule Three,” continued Mariner, “You’re exclusive with me. No playing the field. I, however, reserve the right to shop around for something better.”

His eyelids began to droop. His goofy smile remained bright as ever. “I can think of at least five hotties, if you want suggestions.”

Mariner smiled briefly, but then sobered. Her hand tightened in his, and she said gravely, “Rule Four: you gotta keep being my best friend. That’s a deal-breaker. Even if I crush your heart because I’m way too good for you, that part can’t change.”

“You too,” he mumbled, and squeezed her hand just as tightly. “Why do you think I fell for you, stupid?”

Her stomach twirled, and she chewed at her lip. “Rule Five…” she continued.

Boimler lay there, eyes fully closed, his grin settling into an exhausted look of satisfaction. Whatever had been in T’Ana’s hypo had finally caught up with him.

“Rule Five: you need some sleep,” she told him. She tucked his hand down at his side.

“Don’t wanna sleep,” he mumbled.

“Why not?”

As she tried to pull away, his weak grasp tugged at her hand. “‘Cause then I’m just gonna think this was a dream,” he grumbled. 

Struck by an idea, Mariner poked him in the ribs, rousing him. His eyes opened, and he squalled as she said, “Stay awake another minute. I’ll be right back.”

Before he could protest, Mariner plunged through the privacy curtain. She ignored the curious looks from sickbay’s staff as she rooted through a few equipment drawers, finally finding the device she was looking for, and hurried back through the curtain again to Boimler’s bed.

His eyelids drooped as she lifted his hand and aimed a thin, cylindrical silver device at the back of it. “What’s that?” he said.

“A medical scriv,” she said. “Doctors use ‘em to write on patients. You know, ‘cut here,’ or ‘don’t amputate this limb,’ that kind of stuff.” As she thumbed its activator, the scriv lit with a needle-thin laser, which beamed blue pigment onto the back of Boimler’s hand.

“Tickles,” he whined feebly.

“Almost done,” she said. With the unfamiliar tool, she drew a clumsy heart across the back of Boimler’s hand, and then scrawled her name inside of it, branding him with dark blue ink. “There. That’ll do until I can replicate a tattoo hypo for tomorrow. I’m gonna ink ‘Property of Mariner’ on your butt.”

“T’morr’w?” he mumbled. His face grew slacken. With his marked hand, he reached out blindly for her.

Mariner caught his hand, easing it back onto the bed. “T’Ana is putting me on your recovery team. We’ll have you looking pasty and gangly again in no time.”

“Mmn.” He grunted, pleased.

As his breathing slowed and steadied, Mariner reached for the button to deactivate the privacy curtain. With the adrenaline of the moment fading, she felt heavy from her long week of worry and menial labor. She would go back to her quarters and pass out face-down on her bed, probably for the whole day. 

But her thumb lingered above the button without pressing it. “Hey, Boims?” she whispered.

Boimler made a soft noise, barely more than a breath whistling through his nose. If any part of him was still awake, it was fading quickly.

There, behind the privacy curtain, in a quiet universe of their own, Mariner bent down beside his bed. Her lips drew a hair’s breadth from his ear, and she whispered so softly that she herself could barely hear the words.

“I love you.”

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Lower Drecks