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.”