Reaching overhead, her hand clasped the next rung of the ladder.  The metal bar felt slick.  Before she managed to grab the next rung with her other hand, her palm slipped.  Her grasp felt insecure.  Yuulik ignored the sensation; she ignored the fear.  

Move keep moving, she told herself; be first or die.  

She reached for the next rung, continuing her climb up the Jeffries tube.  Mid-reach, Yuulik glanced at her palm, looking for the source of the moisture.  She was disappointed not to see maintenance grease on her hand; she was grateful not to see blood.

She expected there to be blood.

Yuulik sniffed at her hand as she reached for the following rung.  Breathing in deep, she gauged there was nothing wrong with the ladder.  There was something wrong with her.  Her own perspiration was what jeopardised Yuulik’s grip.  She didn’t know if she was sweating from the climb or if she was rattled by what she’d left behind in the morgue.

But she hadn’t left it all behind entirely.  From beneath her, an imperious voice echoed up the Jefferies tube.  

“Give me a phaser.”  

Yuulik still involuntarily cringed whenever she heard the sound of her voice.  

“I command you.“

Yuulik snarled her response: “Shut up, Flavia.  You’re a civilian.”  

The pit of Yuulik’s stomach tightened.  She instantly regretted displaying such emotion to Flavia.  For a time, Flavia had been Yuulik’s superior in the science department; in another time, Flavia had been an enemy combatant.  As a representative of the Romulan Free State, Flavia wasn’t entirely an ally to the Federation, but she maintained certain diplomatic privileges aboard the starship Constellation.  

Since joining Captain Taes’ crew almost a year ago, Flavia had mainly played mind games on Taes and then immediately admitted her mind games to Taes in what must have been a critical component of a third set of entirely separate mind games.  As a result, indifferent ennui was all Yuulik chose to give Flavia.  However, the physical exertion had already taxed what was left of Yuulik’s famously slim patience.

“Give me a phaser, Yuulik.  You owe me,” Flavia demanded once again.  Disrespectfully, she didn’t even sound out of breath as she kept pace with Yuulik, ascending the ladder from below.

“Even if this wasn’t all your fault,” Flavia pointedly asked, “Would you gamble your life that you’re a better sharpshooter than me?”

“Yes, yes, you win,” Yuulik sighed as patronisingly as she could muster.  For inspiration, Yuulik channelled the way T’Kaal often explained the most simplistic tenets of logic to security boy.  

Without looking down, Yuulik said, “You’re a better murderer than me.  Applause.  That must secure you all the research funding in the Romulan Free State. I’m still not giving you a phaser.”

Flavia huffed.  “Say it out loud then.  You want it to get me.  Is that it, dear?”  

Yuulik thought she heard Flavia slip, but she couldn’t afford to look down.  She couldn’t risk the vertigo.

Flavia had grunted, and then, with a musical lilt, she asked, “Would you leave me to die?”

The sound of the tricorder clipped to Yuulik’s thigh shifted.  A gentle humming became an intrusive trill.  Swiftly, Yuulik waved a hand above her head, and the overhead hatch parted.  She pulled herself up to the next deck, finding a horizontal tube stretched out before her.  Yuulik crawled across to the narrow grated path, but she didn’t move very far.  She sat herself down deliberately.  Yuulik raised her chest, and squared her shoulders, taking up space in the Jeffries tube.  Yuulik slapped her palms down on her thighs and she waited.

Following Yuulik up the vertical shaft, Flavia shifted into the narrow space between Yuulik and the side of the tube.  Flavia’s dark eyes widened at Yuulik, while she sneered a wordless question at her.

Softly, Flavia finished her earlier question with the word “Again.“

Leaning into Flavia, Yuulik let out a breath through her nose.  Without blinking, Yuulik stared at Flavia, bobbing her head from side to side.

“That’s a good point, yes,”  Yuulik spoke in a brittle timbre, her intentions as transparent and sharp-edged as her words.  “I did leave you to die, so why aren’t you dead?”

To her credit, Flavia didn’t flinch.  She stared back at her impassively.  The only reaction Yuulik saw was the corners of Flavia’s lips pinched tight.

“You stabbed me, you called me a traitor, and now you want me to confess?” Flavia asked incredulously.  She swayed closer to Yuulik.  “Heh.  What is this supposed to be?  Foreplay?“

“What?” Yuulik coughed.  She shook her head and narrowed her eyes on Flavia.  Far more plainly, Yuulik said, “I thought you were a Changeling.  But I was wrong.  How did you survive?  The Kholara Observatory was swarmed by time-lost Jem’Hadar fighters.  The runabout sensors couldn’t lock onto you.  I really did think you were dead.”

Yuulik didn’t see it happen until she was already knocked prone.  Somehow maintaining her footing on the ladder, Flavia raised her palms combatively and shoved Yuulik down.  Yuulik didn’t understand what happened until she was already rolling onto her back, onto her side.  She felt Flavia’s hands on her again, shoving her aside, as Flavia crawled past her, deeper into the tube.

Flavia barked, “Commander, I will be dead if we don’t go murder that thing.  Keep your feeble questions to yourself and get moving!  We’re losing its trail!”

Scrambling onto her hands and knees, Yuulik couldn’t argue with Flavia’s urgency.  But Flavia’s everything else?  She could still argue.

“We don’t have to kill her,” Yuulik insisted while she scampered forward, following Flavia.  The trilling from Yuulik’s tricorder came faster yet.  “We only have to stop her.  That talk is exactly why you don’t get a phaser.”

“More shortsighted Federations laws.  You fear one phaser in the hands of a scientist, but you spurn the oldest precepts of the universe.  Classic.”  With a quiet intensity, Flavia promised Yuulik, “I know what I have to do.”

Pausing her progress for only a moment, Yuulik patted her hip to check the tracker on her tricorder.  But she was still disoriented by the tumble, and she put her hand on the wrong hip.  Yuulik’s palm landed on her phaser holster, and it folded softly under her examination.  It was empty.  Her phaser was gone.

“…So the Romulans are our allies now?” Nova asked Yuulik.  

The words came out of Nova haltingly between a couple of “uh”s while she mentally pieced together her recent readings on interstellar politics.  Too, Nova was out of breath from trying to keep pace with Yuulik.  The pair of them hurried down a lonely corridor on deck nineteen.  Yuulik rarely moved slower than a scurry, and on this morning, she was striding at speed.  Between the smooth tread of Nova’s dress uniform boots and the polished brass deck plates of Constellation, Nova felt as if she might lose her footing at any moment.  

“No?” Yuulik remarked gently, granting Nova a rare grace.  Whenever Nova observed a science officer make even an insignificant error of little more than a decimal place, Yuulik relished in correcting them loudly.  The way Yuulik winced, she appeared positively apologetic to be disagreeing with Nova.  Her wide-set eyes bulged, and her inset nostrils flared.

Plainly impassioned by the subject, Yuulik lectured, “You were in temporal stasis, lost in the interphase fold, when the Star Empire fell.  Most of the remaining Romulan factions have descended into anarchy.  Only the Romulan Republic have proven peaceable and cooperative with the Federation.  In fact, when I solved food scarcity in the Kunhri system last year, Taes negotiated with a Romulan Republic commander to take the planet’s starving Remans under their wing.”

While Nova nodded at Yuulik’s explanation, she unfastened the collar of her dress uniform jacket, levelled out the two dangling edges and fastened it closed again.  Nova briefly considered calling the computer for a holographic mirror, but her attention was derailed by what Yuulik told her.

“Now that’s why Romulan Republic scientists conduct research aboard Constellation?” Nova asked.  She shook her head at Yuulik apologetically; soon after Nova had joined the crew, the Romulan contingent had collectively withdrawn.  There had been no sighting, no gossip, of them since before Frontier Day.

Yuulik frowned again, but her glassy grey eyes met Nova’s eyes with warmth.

“No, the returning science team,” Yuulik said, “are citizens of the Romulan Free State.  The Free State held onto the most expansive stretch of Romulan territory; some consider them to be the most legitimate governing body of the Romulan people.  At best, they’ve proven to be agnostic to the Federation.  At worst, antagonistic.”

Nova snickered.  When she shook her head, her eyes wandered.  Taking notice of the crooked positioning of Yuulik’s combadge, Nova plucked it from Yuulik’s chest and re-applied it carefully.

“And we’re supposed to work alongside them?” Nova asked incredulously.

Yuulik glanced down at her combadge and she flicked at it, turning its angle slightly askance.

“To avoid utter chaos in the region, yes,” Yuulik said.  “The Federation has negotiated research agreements with the Romulan Free State.  They used to lead our science department until Taes came to her senses and named me chief science officer.  By returning the RFS scientists to our crew, we can prove to our respective governments that cooperation is possible.  In theory.”

“And yet,” Nova said, pausing to sniff, “they withdrew when the Dominion’s lost fleet attacked Deneb.”

Tilting her head to the left, Yuulik admitted, “Even after we worked with them for a year, I saw none of their ships at the battle of farpoint.  I can’t say Taes has made many headwinds in actually improving diplomatic relations.”

Nova replied, “I guess I can’t blame them after their mission commander, Flavia, went missing in action.”

Yuulik didn’t reply to that.  She didn’t even look at Nova.  She just kept walking.

“Oh god, I didn’t mean to–” Nova sputtered out.  “Sootrah, you know I would never–“

Nova’s voice was drown out by the mechanical hiss of the heavy shuttle bay doors heaving apart.  Beyond the doorway, Captain Taes was standing at attention in the middle of the shuttlebay.  While Nova’s dress uniform felt like it was made from mismatched parts, Taes’ uniform looked to be made from liquid cloth: a perfect fit.

A moment earlier, Yuulik had been stomping down the corridor like a beast of burden.  Like a fire lit under her ass, Yuulik pivoted on her heel and sauntered into the shuttlebay.  There was something childlike about the way Yuulik turned into the large compartment.  Her arm swung out as she turned and she practically broke out into a skip.  Nova had always admired the way Yuulik moved; it was as if she had never been self-conscious in her life.

Nova followed Yuulik into the shuttlebay, a handful of paces behind her.  Through the open hangar, Nova could see an outcropping of the Markonian Outpost, which housed one of Starfleet’s only operational offices in the entire Delta Quadrant.  As soon as Nova’s eyes focused on the outpost, her view was blocked by a green Romulan shuttle approaching Constellation.

Yuulik moved to stand beside Taes.  Without looking at her, Yuulik remarked, “There’s still time to close the blast doors, isn’t there?”

Without looking back at Yuulik, Taes asked, “Is that how you’re choosing to present yourself?”

Even once the shuttle approached for a landing, Yuulik said nothing more.

“I don’t think you understand,” Yuulik said.  

As much as that was a common expression from Yuulik –practically her catchphrase– the words carried none of her casual condescension.  If anything, the sentence ended with an undercurrent of fear as punctuation.  Yuulik leaned over Nune’s shoulder, close enough to back-seat pilot the engineering panel where he was seated.  She tapped at the remote sensing system, cancelling out Nune’s last command.

Huffing in frustrated defeat, Nune raised his hands from the console.  Yuulik’s physical presence was as profuse as the blue glow from the warp core.  His nostrils were filled with the fragrance she wore: floral yet peppery.  As delicately as her scent, Yuulik lowered her voice to say more.  Nune could empathically sense she intended to avoid being overheard by the other officers across the engineering deck.

Gravely, Yuulik said, “Captain Taes is losing her patience.”

“How is that possible?” Nune asked, keeping his voice low, too.  “I’ve watched Captain Taes debate a Pakled for three hours over the definition of a sector.  Most of that time was spent on explaining a cuboid.  Her smile didn’t crack once.”

Yuulik replied, “The opportunity to examine a Wolf-Rayet star is a rare amusement,” as she thumbed through the wheel interface for the gamma-ray telescope’s settings.  “We were only granted leave from our survey of the Borg’s borders because their sightings in the Gradin Belt have diminished.  Now that we’re parked this deeply in the star’s corona, we should be drowning in sensor readings.  And yet our sensors are demonstrating as little proficiency as newly graduated cadets.”

“I’m working on it,” Nune said, gritting his teeth at the thinly-veiled slight.  While Yuulik adjusted the gamma-ray telescopes, Nune accessed the controls for the z-range particulate spectrometer.

Little time passed before Yuulik’s comeback.  Her intonation had a reflexive quality, like a ball being volleyed back.  She spat her words out quickly and then laughed at her joke twice as long as it took her to say it.

“Would it help,” Yuulik asked, “if I straddled a probe and launched out there with a tricorder?”

Since it seemed safe to do so, Nune cheekily asked, “Didn’t you already try that on Frontier Day?”

Yuulik blinked at him when he glanced back over his shoulder.  Were he anyone else, Nune would have expected a barrage of insults as punishment for mentioning one of Yuulik’s failures.  But Yuulik hadn’t raised her voice to him since their long days of puzzling ancient technology together on Camus Two.  

…Except for that one other time neither of them talked about anymore, the last time they were in the Delta Quadrant.

Tapping on the upper display, Nune accessed the deflector system status.  A simple schematic of USS Constellation appeared on the display, surrounded by a circular shield bubble representing their metaphashic shields.

Nune summarised his findings by telling her, “The shield harmonics protecting us from the corona’s radiation is also filtering out the radiance and energy of the star before it can reach the apertures of our sensors.  New technologies enhance our short-range sensors and shields, mostly tested in laboratories.  Our mission parameters include finding the most effective shield modulations for this kind of study.”

Yuulik lay her palms to rest on Nune’s shoulders.  Had Kellin made the gesture, Nune might have detected distinctly tactile overtones.  Within Yuulik’s grip, he was being claimed.

“Aren’t I fortunate,” Yuulik asked, “to have an ex-engineer in my science department?”

Nune’s shoulders tensed instinctively.  Yuulik softened her grip on him.  For all the strides they’d made in their friendship, she didn’t manage to find the words to ask him why he tensed up.

“I’m not the only one,” Nune said, deflecting.  Playfully taunting, Nune went on to say, “I’ve seen you conspiring over tables in the Planetarium most nights.  Pagaloa has caught your eye, or is it his cybernetic augmentations?  Should I be jealous?”

Yuulik tsked and said, “Don’t minimise us.  I treasure my friendship with you.”

And Nune could sense she was hopelessly sincere in that moment.

Yuulik explained, “Taes expects me to collaborate kindly with the senior staff and we all know Pagaloa is the most,” –she lowered her voice to a hiss of a whisper– “tragic among us.”

As if the effort of standing for even three minutes had grown too arduous for her, Yuulik flopped herself into the chair at the engineering console by Nune’s side.  She put a hand on his shoulder again and looked him right in the eyes.

Revealing secrets with such ease, Yuulik said, “It’s not common knowledge that Taes allowed Pagaloa’s daughter to move aboard the ship conditionally after her mother and stepfather were killed on Frontier Day.  That wasn’t the arrangement any of them had agreed to as a family.  None of them wanted Misriam out here with Pagaloa.”

Nune winced.  “That’s harsh.”

Yuulik nodded.  “He said it to me himself.”

“So what does that mean?” Nune asked, leaning in closer to Yuulik.  “Have you been babysitting Misriam?”

Yuulik chuckled softly under her breath, and she slapped Nune on the upper arm.

“Pagaloa isn’t that cruel a father,” Yuulik retorted.  “No, Misriam has Addie to look out for her.  Pagaloa and I have been developing child-rearing protocols from the best research available.  Taes has spoken about the importance of filling friendship tanks with affection when you know a relationship might be fraught with risk and conflict in the future.  Pagaloa has been an… experiment to test Taes’ theory.”

“Oh,” Nune said, reading between the lines without telepathy.  “Now that Flavia is back, you’re worried Taes will demote you again?”

Yuulik narrowed her eyes at Nune, but her voice remained affable when she said, “Flavia may be on board, but she’s not back.”

Swivelling his chair to face Yuulik, Nune took his hands off the console to cross his arms over his chest.  He widened his eyes at Yuulik to convey the significance of his question.  At the same time, he lowered his voice to an incredulous whisper.

He asked, “How did she come back?  I thought the Jem’Hadar killed her in the Deneb Sector?”

“She hasn’t told me,” Yuulik replied, shaking her head hard enough it made her fins of dark hair bounce from side to side.  “Neither has Taes.  All she’s said is she’s ‘exploring the continued feasibility of Romulan Free State Scientists working in partnership with our crew’ after… what happened in Deneb.”

“Well,” Nune asked, “How feasible do you think–“

Nune saw it before he heard it, but he didn’t understand what he saw until after he heard the sickening crunch.

The thrumming of light across warp engineering was uniform and predictable.  He’d spent enough years on other engineering decks that he could practically time it from memory.  What he saw wasn’t predictable, nor orderly.  It was chaotic, confusing, distressing even.  Flailing limbs plummeted down the open shaft of the warp core.  Despite the staccato outreach for salvation, a vibrant engineer on the catwalk turned into a mere body on the floor in less than five seconds.

Huddled together under the bright lights of the surgical alcove, Yuulik reached out.  She clasped Pagaloa’s forearm and rubbed a thumb on his wrist.  She understood the science within cybernetic implants well enough to trust the pressure from her hand would transmit bio-electric impulses through Pagaloa’s biosynthetic limb.  

However, she had to leave it to trust that her touch would communicate emotional support.  

She knew a hundred different words to challenge, to compete, to incite.  But on this night, she didn’t know what to say.

The Emergency Medical Hologram trained a tricorder over the corpse.  Laid on the biobed was the body of a young Tellarite, his eyes closed.  As a maintenance officer, he had been a charge of Chief Engineer Pagaloa’s department.  The trauma that had killed the young Tellarite was hardly visible to the natural eye.  His mustard-shouldered uniform wasn’t even scuffed or torn.  The inescapable fact of his death seemed impossible.

“–further scans have confirmed my initial pronouncement,” the EMH was saying by the time Yuulik started listening intently again.  The EMH had been droning incessantly about unproductive details for several minutes.  What they said next was the only thing that mattered:

“Ensign Trogrik Claarc’s cause of death was irreversible brain injury from a fall at heights.”

Yuulik squeezed Pagaloa’s forearm, trusting once again.

There was a clattering from across the med bay, signaling Flavia’s entrance from the corridor.  Despite the fine-quilting of the Romulan textile she was wearing, the bright orange of Flavia’s jumpsuit proved an eyesore.  Flavia proved herself an earsore, too, when a nurse attempted to check her in. Flavia pushed past Nurse Rals, shrieking that she has “diplomatic immunity” as the mission commander of the Romulan scientists on board.

Shaking her head, Yuulik rounded the foot of the biobed and planted herself as a wall between Flavia and Claarc’s body.  Yuulik breathed in a deep breath and crossed her arms over her chest.

“No, ma’am,” Yuulik said as disrespectfully as she could manage.  “You have no business being here.”

“I am responsible for the safety of the scientists I brought aboard Constellation,” Flavia insisted, while treading right for Yuulik.  “I will go wherever is necessary to assess the risk to my people when Starfleet officers start dying.  This is where I find the two of you, so this is where I stay.”

Yuulik jutted out her chin, and she pursed her lips, offering nothing.

From behind Yuulik, Pagaloa peaceably said, “Your scientists are safe, Flavia.  Ensign Claarc slipped from the warp core’s upper catwalk.”

“Are you lying to me?” Flavia asked.  She bobbed her head to the side, narrowing her eyes at Pagaloa.  

Muttering, Pagaloa offered a brief expression of confusion to Flavia, and she snatched the medical tricorder out of the EMH’s hands.  As Flavia jutted the scanning device at Claarc’s body, Yuulik swiped a backhand at it.  Flavia smoothly evaded Yuulik’s attempt to slap the tricorder out of her grasp.

Otherwise, Flavia offered no reaction to Yuulik.  Looking at Pagaloa directly, Flavia asked, “Did he fall up and over the guard railing, lieutenant?”

Pagaloa’s face crumbled into a hurt expression.  “Are you calling him clumsy?”

Sighing, Flavia softened her tone to say, “I’m not denigrating your fallen officer.  Just look at him.  Look at how short he is.  He would have needed an anti-grav to get himself over the guardrail.”

Unsettled by what Flavia suggested, Yuulik asked the EMH, “Doctor, are you sure we shouldn’t summon Doctor Nelli to offer a second opinion on the cause of death?”

The EMH crisply replied, “My programming will not permit me to distract Doctor Nelli from her surgery for a patient who is, I’m afraid, already dead.”

Flavia laid the tricorder on the biobed, and when she looked up, something was harder behind her dark irises.  The sharp blades of her eyeliner took on a menacing edge with that look in her eyes.  Her attention fully shifted to the EMH.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to betray your programming, doctor?” Flavia asked.  There was a double-edged temptation to her question.  Smiling emptily, Flavia’ portrayed all the affability and artifice of a bartender asking if you want another drink and yet dreading the answer at the same time.

A voice of a much higher pitch interjected: “Doctor, be brave!  Answer her question.”

That was a voice Yuulik recognised.  Coming in from a side passageway, what looked like a ten- or eleven-year-old human child asked the EMH, “Don’t you dream of being something more?”

The child wore her blonde hair in a high ponytail and was dressed in the patterned overalls that were fashionable among Starfleet brats twenty years earlier.  The only immediate tell that she wasn’t human was the pale pearlescent skin tone and yellow eyes of an A500 synthetic android.

Gaping at her, Pagaloa asked, “Addie, if you’re here, who’s watching Misriam?”

“Misriam is sleeping; she’s fine,” Addie said, then flung herself on the floor with the mewl of a tantrum.  Crawling across the deck, Addie snatched a little hand at Yuulik’s ankles.  

Addie whimpered, “I need my best friend Yuulik because my stomach hurts.”

The EMH moved in Addie’s direction and said, “I can attend you.”

“No, no, no, not the hologram!” Addie screamed.  Flailing defensively, she raised her arms over her face.

When the EMH halted, Nurse Rals stepped in.  He left behind another patient, clearly trained to respond to the greatest suffering.  The tall Bajoran crouched to the deck, approaching Addie slowly.  Between Rals, Yuulik, Flavia and the EMH, Addie was surrounded.  Rals reached a hand out to her.

Addie wailed again, but this time, it was to say, “I feel inflamed.“

“What are you doing, Addie?” Pagaloa asked.  He spoke softly, but there was a demand in his tone.  “You don’t have a digestive system.  You have sarium krellide cells.”

Rals calmly pointed out, “Maybe so, but look?  Her stomach is distended.”

Addie scrambled into Rals’s arms, burying her face in his shoulder.  She balled her fists and clutched the front of his uniform jacket.  None of this changed her demeanour.  Addie continued to groan in distress.

“Listen to him!” she cried out.  “I’m inflamed.  It’s real!  I have inflammation.  Existential inflammation!”

While visually examining Addie’s facial expressions and body language, Yuulik instructed, “Addie, I need you to slow down and run a self-diagnostic.”

Flavia sneered at Yuulik, her lips curled up in disgust.  “Why are you behaving so familiar with the little robot monster?”

“Because Yuulik and I built–” Pagaloa responded.

Pagaloa had started to say, “her,” but a sickening snapping sound drown out his voice. Pain-filled screams from Nurse Rals came next.

“Assimilate this,” Addie spat at Rals when she broke his arm.

Yuulik didn’t even see Flavia move.  Yuulik assumed she blinked and then Flavia’s boot had connected with Addie’s skull.  Flavia’s kick launched Addie out of Rals’s arms, and Addie smashed into a bulkhead. 

Shouting for her to stop, Pagaloa reached for Flavia, reached over Claarc’s dead body to grab Flavia by the shoulders.  He was still attempting to restrain her when Addie punched the bulkhead twice.  Her tiny fists crumpled in the hatch to a Jeffries tube in just two punches.  Moving with a preternatural swiftness, Addie disappeared into the Jeffries tube.  

Yuulik immediately gave chase while Flavia called out from behind her, “Give me a phaser!”

Everyone stared at her.  Stared right at her. 

One by one, their eyes narrowed on her in a manner unnervingly similar to Baneriam hawks tracking their prey.  She moved away from their accusatory gazes, scurrying to the corner. Although Yuulik grasped little fear that Flavia, Ketris, or Pagaloa would physically tear her apart, the ravenous look in their eyes was unmistakable. They would take from her all the same. It was unmistakable: they craved her solutions and her secrets. 

“She got away,” Yuulik said at a whisper. Speaking so softly hardly required any breath from her chest at all. She would keep that much for herself. 

“Pardon me?” asked Lietenant Pagaloa. Even the engineer’s cybenetically-augmented hearing seemed incapable of receiving Yuulik’s words at the other end of the science lab. 

Yuulik took hold of a small synthetic arm, which was laying on the nearest workbench. She squeezed it by its pearlescent wrist. To avoid meeting Pagaloa’s eyes, Yuulik tapped the disembodied arm against the synth leg on the workbench, pretending to look for answers in the spare parts. 

“She got away,” Yuulik said again, still whispering. 

Ketris said, “Speak up, child.”  There was something comforting about the elder Romulan’s matronly tone, even when her words were scolding.  When she spoke, it came with the ease of experience, but nothing she said sounded by rote.  The other Romulan scientists in her party claimed not to know Ketris’s full age, but Yuulik had dug up an abstract of an article published by Ketris over a century ago. 

“Stand in your failure.”  Through a thin wise smile, Ketris concluded, “It’s the Starfleet way.”  

Yuulik dropped the synth arm on the workbench.  She squeezed the lifeless hand for comfort, but even she couldn’t be sure if she was offering strength or seeking strength. 

“Addie got away,” Yuulik said. Turning to face her accusers, Yuulik explained, “Our tricorders and the internal sensors can’t lock onto her. That’s why security found no evidence of her being in warp engineering when Ensign Claarc was murdered.”

Shaking his head, Pagaloa winced at Yuulik. It was a pained expression, one of disbelief.  He patted his palm on the railing that circled the sensor cluster platform.

“Every sensor in the cybernetics lab detected Addie when we constructed her,” Pagaloa insisted. 

“She’s not a shuttlepod,” Yuulik objected fiercely. “We created her. She’s like our daughter.”

“Don’t talk like that, Yuulik!”  Pagaloa’s voice took a firmer edge. It was that voice she’d heard him use to give orders during red alert when he said, “Misriam is my daughter. Addie is an A-five-thousand synthetic android. Standard-issue. Ordinary. Her bioneural brain has less consciousness than a background character in a holonovel. Addie is a shuttlepod.”

As swiftly as Yuulik had armed six different arguments for why Addie was equally alive as Misriam, a memory of Captain Taes’s words drown out the evidence. Every memory of the Dominion invasion of Deneb brought a curdling sedation to Yuulik’s stomach and this one was no different.  Worse than the dread from the Battle of Farpoint was Taes’s promise. If Yuulik clawed out one more scientific success at the expense of the crew‘s well-being, Yuulik would lose her position as Constellation’s chief science officer. 

So Yuulik made a choice. 

Offering an apologetic nod to Pagaloa, she conceded the competition between their daughters and the hypothetical bounds of parental love.  She didn’t need that win.  She could accept that.

Changing the subject, Yuulik said, “Addie looked damaged in sickbay.”

“More than damaged.  She broke that poor nurse’s arm,” Flavia interjected.  Despite her interruption, Flavia appeared more invested in the grime on her jumpsuit than the conversation. Chasing Addie though jefferies tubes had discoloured her knees and Flavia brushed at the grime with her palms.

“There was a protrusion from her stomach,” Yuulik countered. “It’s not supposed to be there.”

Drumming her fingers on an LCARS interface, Yuulik accessed holographic schematics of Addie. With a swipe of her hand, Yuulik tossed the hologram to a full-size representation, standing on the sensor platform. 

“Neither a construct nor a creation,” Flavia remarked.  She didn’t look up when she spoke. “That is an abomination.”

Scoffing, Yuulik insisted, “Nothing so dramatic. Addie is an Automated Domestic Deputy series 1E. She’s a synth designed to assist with babysitting.  She’s practically made of the same materials as this starship. After Misriam’s mother died, the Daystom Institite sent us the specs and we manufactured the components at Avalon Fleet Yards.  Our ship was never meant to house children and Pagaloa’s options became slim after Frontier Day.”

Flavia raised her palms and she turned on the spot, looking lost in the laboratory, even though the space was smaller than a bridge module.  She looked over at her Romulan colleague, Ketris, and she blinked at her in a quick but unnatural fashion. Then she locked eyes with Yuulik. 

“Did the great Yuulik honestly only reassemble an old synth that was melted down to scrap fifteen years ago?” Flavia asked, but it didn’t sound anything like a question. It was an assumption. “You weren’t a little bit tempted to make it better?  Cybernetists who devoted their lives to designing synths couldn’t have known insight like Science Chief Yuulik, henh?”

“What are you—What are you implying?” Yuulik asked, squinting at Flavia. Swiping her fingers over the analysis platform’s LCARS interface, Yuulik accessed Addie’s coding, displaying it across every computer panel set into the bulkheads of the hexagonal compartment. 

Yuulik said, “I educated her, yes. I offered her more databases about childhood education. More personality to be a better friend to Misriam.”

Flavia sliced her palm through the air, over the platform. The computer took the cue and winked out the life size hologram of Addie herself. 

“You don’t need to train synths on how to replace us,” Flavia spat at Yuulik. “That carnal desire is hidden within their very base code. Why do you think she’s killing your young officers first, henh?  She’s testing her own strength. This was deviant necromancy, Yuulik. You dragged it out of the grave without any of her polite Federation inhibitions.”

Raising her voice to overtake Flavia’s, Yuulik riposted, “Here we go. This is the time of day when you tell me about myself. You think you’re so guarded and mysterious with your meaningful Romulan glances. You’re not. You’re transparent. You’re only angry about getting replaced because I replaced you.”

“And what does it mean if you’re only the best by replacing me?” Flavia asked through a patronising laugh. “How much utility do you offer if you can only shine when you’re tearing someone else down?  Is that a mark of brilliance at all, if it lives it in such narrow circumstances?”

“Ladies, ladies,” Pagaloa called out. He didn’t shout. Rather, he spoke with an exceedingly musical lilt. The sheer variation in tone snapped Yuulik out of her debate team death spiral with Flavia. 

Stabbing his index finger at the video playing on a monitor, Pagaloa said, “I’ve been reviewing the internal sensor footage of Addie while she’s recharging and, look, she was the one to construct the device on her abdomen. It’s a sensor dampener. She was building it for weeks!”

“Was that part of your education, Yuulik?” Flavia asked. 

“Curious,” Ketris added, from the standing console where she was examining another section of Addie’s programming.  “Why does Addie have a subroutine to recognise over three-thousand distinctive Borg implants?”

The room went quiet for Yuulik and her hands went cold. Why would a babysitting synth require any Borg-related programming?  In the time it took her to read the coding Ketris had highlighted, Yuulik stopped hearing the life support systems and even Flavia’s bleating. Her entire world shrunk down to a pinprick of focus. 

But when Ketris spoke again in her ominously halting cadence, Yuulik heard her words. 

“Addie’s dancing subroutines are also clearly styles of martial arts. Clearly,” Ketris said. 

Despite what she could see with her own eyes, Yuulik meekly said, “No, they’re not. Addie isn’t— she isn’t a fighter.”

At the same time, Pagaloa was asking, “How did we miss that?”

Ketris was confident in her answer. “Youth.”