Fic: "Where My Hand Is Set (My Soul Shall Be)" (1/2)
Title: Where My Hand Is Set (My Soul Shall Be)
Fandom: ST:AOS/XI
Summary: The story of how Caitlin Barry got to the Yorktown and acquired a lover--or two.
Relationship: Cait/One/Pike
Rating: NC-17
Content Advisory:
Word Count: 13,000. Yes, 13K.
Notes: Written for boosette, of course, for the Where No Woman New Year's Exchange. As if we all didn't know I'm the one who wrote this one. boosette swears she didn't rig the assignments. She also says the story is better than a bicycle. I'll leave you to judge. :) Thanks to hellokatzchen for the beta.
“Barry!”
Lt. Caitlin Barry, assistant chief engineer, U.S.S. Aquino, backed out of the Jeffries tube she’d been halfway in, a sonic spanner in her mouth. She turned to the speaker, Lt. Cmdr. Whitney Ashwell, chief engineer of the Aquino, and said, “Hm?”
“Captain wants to see you,” Ashwell said, her brow furrowed. “You might want to change first, though. You’re covered in-” She waved generally at Cait’s torso.
Cait spit the spanner into her hand, looked down at her red tunic, liberally spotted with black handprints, and said, “Yeah, good idea.”
“I’ll have Ensign Throx finish the bypass. Don’t worry about it. Dismissed,” Ashwell said, and Cait snapped out a brief and only slightly ironic salute before leaving.
She changed quickly and ran a hairbrush through her hair before leaving her quarters; her roommate, Oliver, was on gamma shift that week and therefore asleep, so she was as quiet as possible. It took her a good ten minutes to get to the captain’s ready room, and she paced outside for a moment before she touched her fingers to the annunciator.
Captain Adrell said, “Come,” almost immediately, and Cait tugged her tunic into place before walking through the door.
Adrell-human, female, and pushing fifty, with a white streak in her dark hair that Cait sometimes envied-looked up. “Ah. Lieutenant Barry.”
“Sir,” Cait said, trying not to shift her weight from foot to foot.
“There’s been a situation,” the captain said. “The chief engineer on the Yorktown was killed, rather spectacularly, last week, and the captain needs someone to fill the job.”
“The assistant isn’t acceptable?”
“The assistant’s a lieutenant j.g.,” Adrell said. “If Chris doesn’t think he should be promoted, then he’s probably right.”
Cait nodded. “Of course, sir.”
“I’ve offered your services to the Yorktown on a trial basis,” Adrell said. “They need someone at least long enough to get back to earth, which will take most of a month; if you work well with them, they may apply to keep you. If not, you can come back here.”
“Oh,” Cait said. It was a staggeringly-generous offer; at thirty-five, she was perhaps a little young to be promoted to chief engineer. And for Adrell to keep her spot open-! “Thank you, sir. That’s-more than I deserve.”
“It really isn’t,” Adrell said, and smiled. “You’ve been a phenomenal officer, Barry, and we’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“Thank you, sir,” Cait repeated, after a moment; she really was at a loss of what to say otherwise. “I’d be glad to help the Yorktown out.”
“I thought you would,” the captain said. “I knew the captain when he was a mere lieutenant, back on the Exeter. He’s a good man. The only problem is-” Adrell winced. “Thanks to the vagaries of deep-space communication, we’ll be docking at Starbase XI in about seven hours and you’ll be transferred over to the Yorktown then.”
Cait’s eyes widened. “Sir, I don’t know-”
Adrell held up a hand. “I’m pretty sure I know what you’re going to say, and I took the liberty of asking the mess to make a cake. There will be a going-away reception at 1900 on the observation deck.”
That wasn’t, actually, in the least what Cait was going to say, but it was definitely a good substitute. “Thank you again, sir. I-I probably should go pack-”
“Yes, of course. Dismissed, Lieutenant Barry. I’ll say my farewells at the reception.”
“Yes, sir.” Cait gave an entirely non-ironic salute and left.
As soon as she was away from the bridge, she gave in and ran. Shit shit shit, she thought to herself. I don’t even know what engines and systems are on the Yorktown, and I don’t have time to look it up. I hope I get a shift or so to settle in.
* * *
Cait managed to pack in record time, even without waking her roommate. She cleaned out her desk, separated out her personal tools from the ship’s tools, moved her personal files to a padd and a datachip, wiped the ship’s padds, transferred all her security codes over to Ensign Newton at Ashwell’s instruction, and went through the standard transfer interview with the first officer-all before the reception, which was scheduled for two and a half hours before they reached the starbase. She arrived to her own party about ten minutes late, and got a cup full of something clear shoved into her hand within seconds of arriving.
“Cait!” Marissa Oliver, her roommate, was the one who’d handed her the drink. “Drink up!”
“I have to be sober when I get to the Yorktown,” Cait said, but took a sip anyway. A moment later, she sputtered. “What the hell is that?”
“Best not to ask,” Ashwell said, with a lopsided grin.
Engine-room hooch, Cait translated. “Yeah, I’m not drinking any more of that. Is there anything non-intoxicating here?” she called over the general noise of the party.
“The Vulcans are drinking some sort of chocolate milkshake,” Throx offered.
“Oh, good.”
The chocolate milkshakes were excellent; the cake, red velvet with cream-cheese frosting, was phenomenal. Cait wondered aloud if she’d be allowed to stow one of the chefs away in her luggage, and got a laugh or two out of that. All too soon, though, her coworkers and friends were hugging her (and, in some cases, kissing her) goodbye, and she was standing in the transporter room, her duffels by her side, trying not to cry. The Aquino was only her second ship since graduating the academy, and she’d rather thought she’d get the tap to be chief after Ashwell gave in to the inevitable and accepted a command crew post, probably as a first officer. She’d also genuinely liked and respected nearly everyone on the ship and counted a good deal of them as friends. It would be-interesting to have a new ship.
The last thing she saw on the Aquino was Captain Adrell and Lt. Cmdr. Ashwell standing by the transporter console, and the first thing she saw on the Yorktown was a Bolian ensign at the transporter console. And-no one else.
“Hello,” Cait said, and the ensign nodded and busied hirself with something at the console. Okay. She blinked, and stepped off the platform, turning to lug her duffel bags with her. She hadn’t really expected anyone to be there to greet her, but . . .
The doors swished open. “Lieutenant Barry, I presume?” Cait looked up at the speaker. Oh, wow. Apparently the captain himself-human, probably Terran-had deigned to come greet her, albeit a minute or two late.
“Yes,” Cait said, dropping her bags and standing at attention. “Lieutenant Caitlin M. Barry, reporting for duty, sir.” In all the hubbub, she’d never managed to get his name.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” the captain said, a half-smile on his face. “Ensign, call someone to move the new chief engineer’s bags to her quarters.”
“Yes, sir,” the ensign said, voice barely audible.
“Come with me,” the captain said, and Cait followed him out of the transporter room. “I understand the Aquino is on completely different time from the Yorktown; we just got done with alpha shift, which is why I’m here meeting you. I left my XO on the bridge; I’ll take you there after I show you around a bit.”
“Thank you, sir.”
They’d reached the door of the turbolift, and he stopped and turned to her. “Thank you for being amenable to transferring, Lieutenant. We-” He paused. “Commander Khoury’s death was unexpected.”
Cait nodded. “I’m happy to be here, sir.” She looked at him a little more carefully; some of the lines on his face were probably not due to age. He only had five or so years on her, but there were silver hairs scattered here and there among the light brown. He filled out the gold command tunic quite nicely, though, and-it struck her rather abruptly-he was really quite attractive.
Well. She’d lived with that before; Ashwell, despite her severe haircut and clothing, was prettier than most of the holo-models, and it had only taken Cait a few weeks to get accustomed to it.
“Engineering first,” the captain said, and smiled. “If you’re anything like the rest of the department, I’ll have to pry you out of there with a crowbar.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Cait demurred. It was altogether too accurate; she may not go over schematics in her spare time like some of the more dedicated of her staff, but more than anything, she loved getting her hands dirty.
Of course, the minute she saw the warp coil, pulsing in its cage, she forgot that she was supposed to be projecting her best image and just stared. Ashwell had told her that the Yorktown was supposedly one of the most advanced ships out there, and now-now, she believed it.
* * *
The captain eventually pried her out of there, although he didn’t have to resort to a crowbar, and gave her the tour. He trotted her by the mess, the hall with her quarters on it, the recreation rooms, and Sickbay extremely briefly. The beta-shift doctor, named Donhowe, told her to report at some point before she actually started working; something about his manner caused Cait’s skin to prickle.
“Come back during alpha shift,” the captain said quietly after they left Sickbay. “Donhowe’s an amazing surgeon but I think you’ll get along better with Phil Boyce, the CMO.”
Cait nodded. In addition to Dr. Donhowe, she’d met the assistant chief engineer, named Lt. (j.g.) Patil; the science officer was Lt. Spock, a Vulcan who’d raced through Starfleet Academy in two years flat. And not a single person that she’d been introduced to had bothered to address the captain by his name, so she still had no idea what it was.
“Captain,” she said, when they were waiting for the turbolift, and stopped.
He looked at her expectantly, both eyebrows raised.
“This is embarrassing,” she admitted, “but I had seven hours to pack and disentangle myself from the Aquino, and I didn’t have enough time to do as much research as I might have liked.”
“Oh, I expected that, Lieutenant,” he said, face smoothing. “Don’t worry; you won’t be on shift until the alpha after next.”
“I-that’s not it, Captain.” She took in a deep breath. “I have no idea what your name is.”
He turned to her, cocked his head to one side, and said, “I didn’t-?”
Cait shook her head.
The captain let out a laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long few days, as you might imagine. I’m Christopher Pike, captain of the U.S.S. Yorktown.”
Pike. Another one? She looked at him a little closer-other than being Terran and light-skinned, he didn’t particularly resemble the man under whom she’d done her first three-month training mission. It wasn’t an uncommon name by any means, but . . . “Are you related to Captain Joshua Pike?”
“My father,” Captain Pike said, looking somewhat startled. The turbolift came, and they stepped inside. “Well, he’s Admiral Pike now. How did you know him?”
“Training mission during the Academy on the U.S.S. Ride, sir,” she said.
“Ah,” Captain Pike said. “I didn’t read that far back in your file. I won’t ask you what you thought of my father-”
Cait smiled. It was better that way; she’d thought that Captain Pike the elder was a martinet, and Captain Pike the younger at least seemed to have the sense of humor that his father lacked.
“-and anyway, we’re here.” He smiled again as the door opened, but it wasn’t for her-it was obviously for the bridge of his ship.
To be honest, Cait was an engineer for a reason. She’d never been all that impressed with the bridges of most ships, and, although the Yorktown was definitely one of the best bridges she’d seen, it was still a bridge. However, it abruptly gained her interest when the figure in the captain’s chair stood and turned.
For a moment, she thought perhaps her heart would stop, but it obviously didn’t. Her jaw did drop, though, upon seeing that the XO of the Yorktown was apparently her former skinny, gawky, too-young-to-be-at-SFA roommate with the unpronounceable name who went by “Number One.”
“Oh,” Cait said. She was dimly aware that Captain Pike was performing introductions, but all she could hear was her own voice, too loud within her head. “I guess you really are Number One now, huh?”
Number One smiled, serene yet welcoming, and Cait had to smile in return. A moment later, she felt a hand on her back, heard the captain say, “Mr. Tyler, you’ve got the bridge,” and then realized she was being herded into the captain’s ready room by both Pike and Number One.
“You didn’t tell me you knew her,” Captain Pike was saying to One-apparently now a lieutenant commander, by the stripes at her wrists.
“I assumed it was in her file,” Number One said, “and, as I don’t have any knowledge of her work history or similar, I don’t know what relevance it is that we were roommates at the Academy.”
Captain Pike frowned, but Cait interrupted, saying, “That was almost fifteen years ago.”
“Well,” Captain Pike said, “I don’t think it’s exactly going to hurt ship morale for a couple of old friends to be on the senior staff.”
Old friends. Right. Cait had fuzzy memories of Number One’s eighteenth birthday and assumed that One had the same fuzzy memories involving too much alcohol and too little clothing, although they’d stamped a giant “DO NOT DISCUSS” on that night. Still, this was going to be surprisingly pleasant. She’d wondered what One had been up to for the last decade and a half, and, well, now she knew.
* * *
The next morning, Cait woke up to a textcomm from Sickbay, reminding her to come in for a physical. She groaned, threw herself through the sonic shower, brushed out her hair, and pulled on a skirted uniform, mostly because she found it before any of the red tunics. The crew cabins on the Yorktown were set up entirely differently from the Aquino, and although she’d unpacked herself, she had no idea where some of her things were.
Once she’d gotten herself into something resembling order, she trotted down to Sickbay, presented herself to the first nurse she saw-a seven-foot-tall, scaly . . . reptilian individual, with lovely markings reminiscent of some of the desert lizards on earth. But zie spoke Standard without an accent whatsoever and directed her to one of the private examination rooms. Cait hopped up on the biobed and waited for the doctor to come in.
She didn’t have to wait long; a human man, his short hair just on the edge of giving up the last bit of dark brown and going completely silver, entered a couple minutes later, flipping through screens on his padd with one finger. “Lieutenant Caitlin Barry,” he said, and looked up at her with disconcertingly-direct blue eyes.
“That’s me,” she said, offering a non-committal smile.
He gave her an amused half-smile in return. “Well, don’t look so suspicious. I’m just the CMO. Philip Boyce-Phil,” he said, extending a hand.
“Cait,” she said, shaking it briefly. “Apparently you’re not too worried about communicable diseases.”
“Got any?” he asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said, and tried for an innocent face.
It didn’t work. “Your records say you haven’t been in for a physical in over a year. Any good reason?”
“Uh . . .” Cait tried to scare up an excuse that wasn’t ‘I didn’t want to’ and failed. “No.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Believe me, Lieutenant Barry, I will not be as easy to manipulate as the medical staff on the Aquino.” He gave her what even the newest cadet would recognize as a Glare of Death.
“I do believe you, sir,” she said.
“Good,” he said, and smiled again.
Cait suspected that the Glare of Death and the Grumpy Doctor routine were all, if not precisely for show, then certainly a work persona, but she certainly wasn’t going to try to cross him this early on.
However, at the end of the interview/checkup/torture session (no, thank you, she did not want to provide him with the number of sexual partners she’d had in the last year), he set the padd down and said, “All right, one more thing to discuss, and this is not in my capacity as CMO but my capacity as unofficial ship bartender. You’re the new chief engineer. What are your views on engine-room hooch?”
Cait raised an eyebrow as far as she possibly could, which was partially defeated by the fact that her eyebrows were near-invisible on the best of days. “Tastes like hell,” she said, when it appeared that he was waiting for an actual answer.
“You going to stop them from brewing it?”
Cait narrowed her eyes, but Boyce’s gaze didn’t waver. Eventually she sighed. “Who am I to stand in the face of so many years of tradition? But,” she said, and pointed a finger at him. “If I get a report of the still taking up more than its fair share of space or supplies, or hooch-making taking up on-duty time, or causing so much as a papercut, it is over.”
Boyce held her eyes for a moment and nodded once. “Understood.”
* * *
It took about two weeks for Cait to figure out that Captain Pike had a thing for Number One. In her defense, she was rarely around the two of them together, and was so busy stepping into her new role on a new ship that she didn’t have much time to contemplate the hypothetical private lives of her commanding officers.
And it wasn’t as if she blamed him. Number One was strikingly beautiful; it would take someone far less intelligent and observant than Captain Pike to have missed that. No, actually, she had to give him bonus points for not being intimidated by One.
What she really couldn’t tell was whether One reciprocated the feeling.
Not that it mattered.
Well, it sort of did. She had a vested interest in Pike being happy, as he was her commanding officer, and of course she wanted One to be happy. But other than that, no, it didn’t matter.
At least, probably not.
* * *
Four and a half weeks out, Cait had entirely forgotten that she was on probation. There was so much to do and so many new duties, being that she was now the head of her department. To be fair, she’d been fairly well-trained by Ashwell, but it was still a significant amount of new things and a steep learning curve. Overall, though, she respected and liked most of her staff and thought everything was going well in her new department.
So when Captain Pike called her into his ready room, she was very surprised to hear him ask, “So, do you think you fit well with the Yorktown?”
Cait blinked. “Isn’t that your job to determine, sir?”
“I’ve already made my decision. I’m asking you for your opinion.”
Oh. “I forgot I was on probation,” she admitted.
“I thought so,” he said. “Well?”
“I think I’m doing fairly well here,” she said after a moment, cautious.
“You are,” he said, relenting and giving her a smile. “I’d already decided within a few days that we’d be offering you the permanent position, and I was not proven wrong.”
“Oh,” Cait said. “Oh. Well then.”
“Presumably you’ll accept?”
She blinked. “Of course. I feel like I’ve been here forever. In a good way, I mean.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll file the paperwork soon. Welcome, again, to the crew of the Yorktown, Lieutenant Barry.”
“Thank you, sir.”
* * *
She celebrated that evening by getting drunk with Phil Boyce. It wasn’t intentional; he invited her to his quarters for a celebratory drink when he passed her in the hallway after alpha shift. She gave him a look, and he snorted. “No, Lieutenant Barry, I’m not trying to get into your pants. If I were going to do that, I’d say so. I’m trying to offer you a drink, since I’ve got the only decent alcohol collection on this ship.”
“Oh,” Cait said, inexplicably disappointed for a second or two. “Sure. Alcohol. What time?”
“Whenever you’re ready, just send me a textcomm.”
Two potent martinis in, she figured out that he didn’t want to get in her pants, he wanted to get in her head. Naturally, she found herself spilling her entire life story to him.
It was worth it; at the end, she honestly felt she had a friend on the crew. Also, his hangover hypos were significantly better than any she’d ever had before, although she didn’t discover that until the next morning.
A few days later, she steeled her nerve and approached Number One when they happened both to be in the mess hall. “Sir,” she said, standing by One’s table.
“Cait,” One said, looking up and smiling. “You don’t have to ‘sir’ me when we’re not working. How are you?”
“Good,” she said. “I, uh, I was wondering if you still play null-G ball?”
“Of course,” One said. “No one here is any good, but I play when I can. Do you still play?”
“I do,” Cait said. “If, you know, if you need someone to play against, I’d love to.” Her hands were still trembling, just barely.
“Oh, I’d love to,” One said, visibly excited. “Tonight? I mean-oh, you probably have something to do. Tomorrow, then?”
“Tonight’s fine,” Cait said. “1900?”
“Yes!”
It only occurred to Cait later that One didn’t have a ton of friends on the ship, probably due to her position. Still, it was gratifying to have the XO so interested in playing with her.
* * *
Cait hadn’t played null-G ball in weeks, but she was definitely still in shape. One apparently hadn’t played in months, but was in even better shape, as revealed by the fact that she kicked Cait’s ass in the first round they played. She also looked much better in the overly-revealing Starfleet-issued workout gear than Cait remembered-which may have contributed to said ass-kicking.
“Again?” One asked, her shoulders heaving. A bead of sweat fell from her temple, trailing down the side of her cheek; Cait watched it jump to her collarbone, and slide down until it disappeared at the top of her tank top.
“Yeah, sure,” Cait said a moment later, realizing that One was waiting for a reply.
It got easier, the more they played, for Cait to be able to concentrate on the game and not the bounce of One’s breasts. On the other hand, when One stripped down in the locker room and stood under the shower, Cait thought her head might explode.
She stammered something about a previous commitment and escaped, but the sight of One’s space-pale skin, her legs, taut and lean, and the perfect curves of her breasts and rear end was permanently etched on the insides of Cait’s eyelids. Damn, damn, damn.
She tossed and turned the entire night after the game. Masturbation hadn’t helped; she was just short of asking Boyce for a sleeping pill or some alcohol when she saw that it was 0500 and she might as well just get up and attempt to accomplish something.
She took a different route down to Engineering; this one took her past the secondary entrance to the mess, just in case Number One had decided to get up extra early as well. She missed seeing One, if she was around, but after she turned the corner, leaving the mess, Cait ran into Captain Pike.
Pike had apparently just come from the gym; he was wearing more of that damnably-tight regulation workout gear, and his hair was soaked with sweat. “Lieutenant Barry,” he said, smiling at her.
I think I’m going to write Starfleet Command and complain, Cait thought. “Captain Pike, sir,” she said aloud. “You’re up early.”
“Early meeting,” he said. “The admiralty doesn’t seem to care what ship’s time is; when they want to meet, they want to meet.”
Cait laughed, as she was meant to, and tried as hard as she could not to stare at the way the sweat-soaked fabric clung to the musculature of his shoulders and chest. She did not turn around to stare at his rear end as he left, but it was a close call.
* * *
After two more weeks of watching Pike and One dance around each other, Cait had had it up to the metaphorical here. She didn’t even need to check the duty roster; it was well into beta shift and Phil Boyce would be in his quarters. She dug through her closet, got out the expensive liquor she’d bought last time they were at a starbase just for this purpose, and sent him a textcomm. >I have Andorian ice vodka.<
She got a response about fifteen seconds later. >I have glasses, vermouth, olives, and hangover hypos.<
>Be right there.< She showed up at his door about a minute later; he let her in, made appreciative noises at the bottle she handed him, and mixed drinks.
Cait gulped the first one down quickly, with a grimace; she didn’t like martinis with olives, and had him make the next one without. By the time she’d gotten about halfway through drink number two, she’d relaxed enough to ask, “What the hell is going on between Pike and One?”
“Why is it any of your business?” Boyce asked, watching her carefully.
She sighed. “Phil, One and I were roommates at the Academy. I’m pretty sure I deflowered her.”
“Really?” he asked, leaning back on his couch. “‘Deflowered?’ Who says that anymore?”
“I do, and yes, really. So what’s going on?”
Boyce snorted and relented. “Something. Nothing. Who the hell knows? Chris is hopeless with women-that is, the asking them out part; I think he can handle the rest-and One, oh, I don’t know. She’s probably scared about chain of command issues.”
“That sounds about right,” Cait said. “Do they not know they’re perfect for each other?”
“Chris knows. I still don’t have any idea what One thinks; even when she does have a drink or two, she just gets quiet. Chris, on the other hand, can’t shut up when he’s had more than two or three beers.” He pinned her with a mild version of the Glare of Death-probably only the Glare of Probable Bodily Harm. “I didn’t tell you that, by the way.”
“Tell me what?” Cait asked innocently, and Boyce shook his head. “Would it work if we locked them together in a closet?” she asked.
“Believe me, Chris would still manage to screw that up. He’s got no problem picking up men-and hell, he even likes women better-but if romance or sex is involved and the person is any more feminine than, say, your average Andorian shen, his legendary ability to talk anyone into anything abruptly disappears.”
Shen were usually fairly androgynous. “Wow. That’s . . . bad.”
“It is. I feel like someone needs to sit down between them and explain their feelings to each other, but it sure as shit isn’t going to be me.”
“Nor me,” Cait said with a shudder. “I don’t need to get into that.”
Boyce gave her an odd look. “No, of course you don’t,” he said a moment later. “More?”
“Yes, please.”
* * *
The unfortunate reality of deep-space exploration was that there was a lot of nothing in between brief periods of possibly life-threatening excitement. Cait was using the down time to make some minor upgrades to the warp core’s processors, and One had wandered down, ostensibly to look, when all of a sudden the ship lurched in a way it wasn’t supposed to, and went dark.
Dark on a starship was really, really dark, until the emergency lights kicked in a few seconds later, with just enough illumination that Cait could see shapes. “Commander One?” she said, hating the tremor in her voice.
“Lieutenant Barry?” That wasn’t One; it was Lieutenant Patil.
“I thought we were the only ones here,” Cait said.
“Me, too,” came One’s voice from just behind Cait, and she felt a hand on her arm. “It’s the three of us, I guess,” One said.
“I was coming back from break,” Patil said. “The console’s dead. What’s going on?”
“My padd’s still working,” One said, the faint glow illuminating her face. “The rest of the ship seems fine. Actually, engineering appears to be working fine. There’s just-” She tapped on the screen. “Huh. There’s something wrong with the uplink. It appears that someone’s put a block over here?” Holding out the padd, she pointed to one corner of it. “I can’t get rid of it from here.”
“Oh, shit,” Cait said immediately, before she’d even had a good look. “The Yorktown never got the patch, did it. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck. I should have checked that a long time ago.”
“Khoury applied the patch, sir, a few weeks before he died,” Patil said. He swallowed. “It’s my fault, for not checking to see if it took.”
One looked back and forth between them. “What patch?”
Cait sighed. “The Exeter, about eight months ago, discovered a flaw in the standard ship’s programming, that allows this particular block to be put in. There’s a group of pirates, the Cambrian raiders, who block Engineering’s ability to communicate with the rest of the ship, and then take over the ships from there. Starfleet issued a patch to fix this particular issue but, well.” She shook her head.
“Are they on board yet?” One asked.
“No,” Patil said, and when the two women turned to look at him, said, “I’ve read up on Cambrian raiding techniques. There’s about a half-hour lag between when the block takes effect and when the raiders arrive via transporter.”
“All right,” One said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes to get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving,” Cait said, squaring her shoulders. “This is my department.”
“It’s my ship,” One said, frowning.
“Don’t you want to defend it?” Cait asked, deciding not to correct her on who exactly was in control of the ship.
“Not when we still have a chance to get the rest of the ship to help us.”
She had a point, Cait conceded. “So we pick Patil’s brain for a couple of minutes and then send him off through the Jeffries tubes.”
Patil opened his mouth to protest, but One was nodding already. “All right; that will work. Lieutenant, what do you know about these raiders? Any weaknesses?”
“Uh . . .” He thought for a moment. “They only fight in space. No one has ever seen them on the surface of a planet.”
“How can we use that?” Cait asked.
“I don’t know yet,” One said. “Anything else, Lieutenant?”
“I-there’s something-oh!” Patil said, bouncing in place. “Their uniforms, the outer layer: it’s not fireproof.”
“So how do we get fire?”
“We don’t,” Cait said. “The fire-dampeners are still on, and there’s nothing down here flammable enough to overcome them.”
“I can fix that,” Patil said, and One held out her padd to him.
“We’d still need something to spark,” Cait said.
“There’s a sparker in the environmental test kit,” Patil said.
“What about fuel?” One said.
Patil opened his mouth to speak, but closed it, visible in the light from the padd on his face. Cait watched his motion, and sighed. “There’s the hooch,” she said.
“Oh?” One said. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Cait snapped. God, that stuff was the bane of her existence. “But Patil here probably does, based on the look on his face, and I’m guessing it’s high enough proof to flame.”
“It is,” Patil said. “I’ve turned off the automatic release of fire-dampeners, and we should be able to get something to flame in five or ten minutes. The hooch is in the back supply closet, behind a false partition.”
“Do we have bottles?” One asked.
“Of course,” Patil said. “The finished hooch goes into bottles.”
“Rags?”
“With the still.”
Cait started grinning. “Well, then,” she said. “I think it’s time to make some cocktails.”
It was only a matter of a few minutes to assemble three Molotov cocktails, bottles mostly filled with the clear liquid, rags stuffed into the top to be lit before they were thrown. “Go, now,” One said to Patil. “We’ll take care of this. When you get outside, get rid of the block as fast as you can and get some security down here.”
Patil hesitated a moment; Cait thought he was about to protest, but he apparently decided not to. “Yes, sir,” he said, and disappeared around the corner. A moment later, Cait heard the door to the tube being opened and shut.
“All right,” One said. “The minute anyone appears who isn’t one of us, you spark, I throw.”
One was taller, stronger, had better aim, and much better night vision; it made perfect sense, but Cait was still a little disappointed that she wasn’t going to get to throw a Molotov cocktail the one and only time she’d ever gotten to make one. She nodded, and they hunched down behind a console to wait.
After a minute or so, Cait switched to kneeling rather than crouching, and steadied herself on One’s shoulder. Once she’d shifted, she realized that she was even closer to One than she’d been before, and sighed. All she needed right now was that kind of distraction, right?
Fortunately, it was only five or seven minutes after that before a shimmering appeared, not too far away from them. “Wait,” One whispered in her ear, and they did, until the shimmering resolved into three humanoid but not human forms, clearly nothing Federation.
“Yes,” Cait hissed, recognizing the pointed uniform epaulets and neckless silhouettes from holos sent out with the patch information, and One held out one of the bombs.
Cait lit it with the sparker, and One stood in one fluid motion and hurled it right at the chest of the lead invader. The cocktail exploded in a burst of flames, and Cait cheered mentally even as she lit the second bottle. One threw it, but the remaining two raiders were calling something in a language Cait didn’t recognize, and they disappeared before the bottle could hit them. It sailed through blank space and exploded onto a console.
“Shit!” Cait yelled, and yanked off her flame-proof tunic to try to smother the flames. One was frantically poking at her padd, and a few seconds later the flames went out. Cait fell back, dusted off her tunic, and put it back on. “Phew,” she said, and One nodded.
They barely had time to take a couple of deep breaths before the lights went back on and a team of red-shirted security officers, led by Patil himself, burst into the room. “They’re gone,” One called out.
The security officers fanned out to make sure, and Patil came up to Cait and One. “Are you all right, sirs?”
“We’re fine, Lieutenant,” One said. “Good work. You got here very quickly.”
“How did the cocktails work?” he asked wistfully, and Cait laughed and told him.
They’d just started the repairs when the whistle sounded through the ship’s speakers. “One? Barry?” Captain Pike’s voice came over the intercom. “Are you okay?”
Cait hit the button on the wall. “We’re fine, sir. We-we had a bit of trouble with some Cambrian raiders, but we chased them off.”
“How? Did you blow up engineering?”
“Only part of it,” One said. “We called a crew to help with repairs; Barry’s managed to reroute the computer traffic through the secondary processors and the primary should be fixed by the end of shift.”
“What happened?”
“It might be easiest if you just pull the security footage,” Cait suggested.
“I’ll do that. Pike out.”
Ten minutes later, as Cait was still rewiring a panel with One’s assistance, Pike called back. “What the hell were those?”
“I believe they’re called Molotov cocktails, sir,” One said; Cait had a wrench in her mouth. “You probably shouldn’t ask where the fuel came from. This might take some creative report-writing.”
“I’ll make Spock write the final version,” Pike said; it was apparently a shared joke, because One laughed. “You’re all right? I’d come down, but I can’t; I’ve got to work until mid-shift.”
“Yes. We’re both fine, and Patil brought some security down to make sure. As soon as Cait finishes rewiring this panel, we’ll go to Sickbay.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll stop by later.”
“It won’t be necessary, sir.”
“Nevertheless, Number One. Pike out.”
Cait shook her head, and made sure that Patil was supervising the installation of the patch before she collected Number One and left.
On to part 2
Fandom: ST:AOS/XI
Summary: The story of how Caitlin Barry got to the Yorktown and acquired a lover--or two.
Relationship: Cait/One/Pike
Rating: NC-17
Content Advisory:
Word Count: 13,000. Yes, 13K.
Notes: Written for boosette, of course, for the Where No Woman New Year's Exchange. As if we all didn't know I'm the one who wrote this one. boosette swears she didn't rig the assignments. She also says the story is better than a bicycle. I'll leave you to judge. :) Thanks to hellokatzchen for the beta.
“Barry!”
Lt. Caitlin Barry, assistant chief engineer, U.S.S. Aquino, backed out of the Jeffries tube she’d been halfway in, a sonic spanner in her mouth. She turned to the speaker, Lt. Cmdr. Whitney Ashwell, chief engineer of the Aquino, and said, “Hm?”
“Captain wants to see you,” Ashwell said, her brow furrowed. “You might want to change first, though. You’re covered in-” She waved generally at Cait’s torso.
Cait spit the spanner into her hand, looked down at her red tunic, liberally spotted with black handprints, and said, “Yeah, good idea.”
“I’ll have Ensign Throx finish the bypass. Don’t worry about it. Dismissed,” Ashwell said, and Cait snapped out a brief and only slightly ironic salute before leaving.
She changed quickly and ran a hairbrush through her hair before leaving her quarters; her roommate, Oliver, was on gamma shift that week and therefore asleep, so she was as quiet as possible. It took her a good ten minutes to get to the captain’s ready room, and she paced outside for a moment before she touched her fingers to the annunciator.
Captain Adrell said, “Come,” almost immediately, and Cait tugged her tunic into place before walking through the door.
Adrell-human, female, and pushing fifty, with a white streak in her dark hair that Cait sometimes envied-looked up. “Ah. Lieutenant Barry.”
“Sir,” Cait said, trying not to shift her weight from foot to foot.
“There’s been a situation,” the captain said. “The chief engineer on the Yorktown was killed, rather spectacularly, last week, and the captain needs someone to fill the job.”
“The assistant isn’t acceptable?”
“The assistant’s a lieutenant j.g.,” Adrell said. “If Chris doesn’t think he should be promoted, then he’s probably right.”
Cait nodded. “Of course, sir.”
“I’ve offered your services to the Yorktown on a trial basis,” Adrell said. “They need someone at least long enough to get back to earth, which will take most of a month; if you work well with them, they may apply to keep you. If not, you can come back here.”
“Oh,” Cait said. It was a staggeringly-generous offer; at thirty-five, she was perhaps a little young to be promoted to chief engineer. And for Adrell to keep her spot open-! “Thank you, sir. That’s-more than I deserve.”
“It really isn’t,” Adrell said, and smiled. “You’ve been a phenomenal officer, Barry, and we’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“Thank you, sir,” Cait repeated, after a moment; she really was at a loss of what to say otherwise. “I’d be glad to help the Yorktown out.”
“I thought you would,” the captain said. “I knew the captain when he was a mere lieutenant, back on the Exeter. He’s a good man. The only problem is-” Adrell winced. “Thanks to the vagaries of deep-space communication, we’ll be docking at Starbase XI in about seven hours and you’ll be transferred over to the Yorktown then.”
Cait’s eyes widened. “Sir, I don’t know-”
Adrell held up a hand. “I’m pretty sure I know what you’re going to say, and I took the liberty of asking the mess to make a cake. There will be a going-away reception at 1900 on the observation deck.”
That wasn’t, actually, in the least what Cait was going to say, but it was definitely a good substitute. “Thank you again, sir. I-I probably should go pack-”
“Yes, of course. Dismissed, Lieutenant Barry. I’ll say my farewells at the reception.”
“Yes, sir.” Cait gave an entirely non-ironic salute and left.
As soon as she was away from the bridge, she gave in and ran. Shit shit shit, she thought to herself. I don’t even know what engines and systems are on the Yorktown, and I don’t have time to look it up. I hope I get a shift or so to settle in.
* * *
Cait managed to pack in record time, even without waking her roommate. She cleaned out her desk, separated out her personal tools from the ship’s tools, moved her personal files to a padd and a datachip, wiped the ship’s padds, transferred all her security codes over to Ensign Newton at Ashwell’s instruction, and went through the standard transfer interview with the first officer-all before the reception, which was scheduled for two and a half hours before they reached the starbase. She arrived to her own party about ten minutes late, and got a cup full of something clear shoved into her hand within seconds of arriving.
“Cait!” Marissa Oliver, her roommate, was the one who’d handed her the drink. “Drink up!”
“I have to be sober when I get to the Yorktown,” Cait said, but took a sip anyway. A moment later, she sputtered. “What the hell is that?”
“Best not to ask,” Ashwell said, with a lopsided grin.
Engine-room hooch, Cait translated. “Yeah, I’m not drinking any more of that. Is there anything non-intoxicating here?” she called over the general noise of the party.
“The Vulcans are drinking some sort of chocolate milkshake,” Throx offered.
“Oh, good.”
The chocolate milkshakes were excellent; the cake, red velvet with cream-cheese frosting, was phenomenal. Cait wondered aloud if she’d be allowed to stow one of the chefs away in her luggage, and got a laugh or two out of that. All too soon, though, her coworkers and friends were hugging her (and, in some cases, kissing her) goodbye, and she was standing in the transporter room, her duffels by her side, trying not to cry. The Aquino was only her second ship since graduating the academy, and she’d rather thought she’d get the tap to be chief after Ashwell gave in to the inevitable and accepted a command crew post, probably as a first officer. She’d also genuinely liked and respected nearly everyone on the ship and counted a good deal of them as friends. It would be-interesting to have a new ship.
The last thing she saw on the Aquino was Captain Adrell and Lt. Cmdr. Ashwell standing by the transporter console, and the first thing she saw on the Yorktown was a Bolian ensign at the transporter console. And-no one else.
“Hello,” Cait said, and the ensign nodded and busied hirself with something at the console. Okay. She blinked, and stepped off the platform, turning to lug her duffel bags with her. She hadn’t really expected anyone to be there to greet her, but . . .
The doors swished open. “Lieutenant Barry, I presume?” Cait looked up at the speaker. Oh, wow. Apparently the captain himself-human, probably Terran-had deigned to come greet her, albeit a minute or two late.
“Yes,” Cait said, dropping her bags and standing at attention. “Lieutenant Caitlin M. Barry, reporting for duty, sir.” In all the hubbub, she’d never managed to get his name.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” the captain said, a half-smile on his face. “Ensign, call someone to move the new chief engineer’s bags to her quarters.”
“Yes, sir,” the ensign said, voice barely audible.
“Come with me,” the captain said, and Cait followed him out of the transporter room. “I understand the Aquino is on completely different time from the Yorktown; we just got done with alpha shift, which is why I’m here meeting you. I left my XO on the bridge; I’ll take you there after I show you around a bit.”
“Thank you, sir.”
They’d reached the door of the turbolift, and he stopped and turned to her. “Thank you for being amenable to transferring, Lieutenant. We-” He paused. “Commander Khoury’s death was unexpected.”
Cait nodded. “I’m happy to be here, sir.” She looked at him a little more carefully; some of the lines on his face were probably not due to age. He only had five or so years on her, but there were silver hairs scattered here and there among the light brown. He filled out the gold command tunic quite nicely, though, and-it struck her rather abruptly-he was really quite attractive.
Well. She’d lived with that before; Ashwell, despite her severe haircut and clothing, was prettier than most of the holo-models, and it had only taken Cait a few weeks to get accustomed to it.
“Engineering first,” the captain said, and smiled. “If you’re anything like the rest of the department, I’ll have to pry you out of there with a crowbar.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Cait demurred. It was altogether too accurate; she may not go over schematics in her spare time like some of the more dedicated of her staff, but more than anything, she loved getting her hands dirty.
Of course, the minute she saw the warp coil, pulsing in its cage, she forgot that she was supposed to be projecting her best image and just stared. Ashwell had told her that the Yorktown was supposedly one of the most advanced ships out there, and now-now, she believed it.
* * *
The captain eventually pried her out of there, although he didn’t have to resort to a crowbar, and gave her the tour. He trotted her by the mess, the hall with her quarters on it, the recreation rooms, and Sickbay extremely briefly. The beta-shift doctor, named Donhowe, told her to report at some point before she actually started working; something about his manner caused Cait’s skin to prickle.
“Come back during alpha shift,” the captain said quietly after they left Sickbay. “Donhowe’s an amazing surgeon but I think you’ll get along better with Phil Boyce, the CMO.”
Cait nodded. In addition to Dr. Donhowe, she’d met the assistant chief engineer, named Lt. (j.g.) Patil; the science officer was Lt. Spock, a Vulcan who’d raced through Starfleet Academy in two years flat. And not a single person that she’d been introduced to had bothered to address the captain by his name, so she still had no idea what it was.
“Captain,” she said, when they were waiting for the turbolift, and stopped.
He looked at her expectantly, both eyebrows raised.
“This is embarrassing,” she admitted, “but I had seven hours to pack and disentangle myself from the Aquino, and I didn’t have enough time to do as much research as I might have liked.”
“Oh, I expected that, Lieutenant,” he said, face smoothing. “Don’t worry; you won’t be on shift until the alpha after next.”
“I-that’s not it, Captain.” She took in a deep breath. “I have no idea what your name is.”
He turned to her, cocked his head to one side, and said, “I didn’t-?”
Cait shook her head.
The captain let out a laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long few days, as you might imagine. I’m Christopher Pike, captain of the U.S.S. Yorktown.”
Pike. Another one? She looked at him a little closer-other than being Terran and light-skinned, he didn’t particularly resemble the man under whom she’d done her first three-month training mission. It wasn’t an uncommon name by any means, but . . . “Are you related to Captain Joshua Pike?”
“My father,” Captain Pike said, looking somewhat startled. The turbolift came, and they stepped inside. “Well, he’s Admiral Pike now. How did you know him?”
“Training mission during the Academy on the U.S.S. Ride, sir,” she said.
“Ah,” Captain Pike said. “I didn’t read that far back in your file. I won’t ask you what you thought of my father-”
Cait smiled. It was better that way; she’d thought that Captain Pike the elder was a martinet, and Captain Pike the younger at least seemed to have the sense of humor that his father lacked.
“-and anyway, we’re here.” He smiled again as the door opened, but it wasn’t for her-it was obviously for the bridge of his ship.
To be honest, Cait was an engineer for a reason. She’d never been all that impressed with the bridges of most ships, and, although the Yorktown was definitely one of the best bridges she’d seen, it was still a bridge. However, it abruptly gained her interest when the figure in the captain’s chair stood and turned.
For a moment, she thought perhaps her heart would stop, but it obviously didn’t. Her jaw did drop, though, upon seeing that the XO of the Yorktown was apparently her former skinny, gawky, too-young-to-be-at-SFA roommate with the unpronounceable name who went by “Number One.”
“Oh,” Cait said. She was dimly aware that Captain Pike was performing introductions, but all she could hear was her own voice, too loud within her head. “I guess you really are Number One now, huh?”
Number One smiled, serene yet welcoming, and Cait had to smile in return. A moment later, she felt a hand on her back, heard the captain say, “Mr. Tyler, you’ve got the bridge,” and then realized she was being herded into the captain’s ready room by both Pike and Number One.
“You didn’t tell me you knew her,” Captain Pike was saying to One-apparently now a lieutenant commander, by the stripes at her wrists.
“I assumed it was in her file,” Number One said, “and, as I don’t have any knowledge of her work history or similar, I don’t know what relevance it is that we were roommates at the Academy.”
Captain Pike frowned, but Cait interrupted, saying, “That was almost fifteen years ago.”
“Well,” Captain Pike said, “I don’t think it’s exactly going to hurt ship morale for a couple of old friends to be on the senior staff.”
Old friends. Right. Cait had fuzzy memories of Number One’s eighteenth birthday and assumed that One had the same fuzzy memories involving too much alcohol and too little clothing, although they’d stamped a giant “DO NOT DISCUSS” on that night. Still, this was going to be surprisingly pleasant. She’d wondered what One had been up to for the last decade and a half, and, well, now she knew.
* * *
The next morning, Cait woke up to a textcomm from Sickbay, reminding her to come in for a physical. She groaned, threw herself through the sonic shower, brushed out her hair, and pulled on a skirted uniform, mostly because she found it before any of the red tunics. The crew cabins on the Yorktown were set up entirely differently from the Aquino, and although she’d unpacked herself, she had no idea where some of her things were.
Once she’d gotten herself into something resembling order, she trotted down to Sickbay, presented herself to the first nurse she saw-a seven-foot-tall, scaly . . . reptilian individual, with lovely markings reminiscent of some of the desert lizards on earth. But zie spoke Standard without an accent whatsoever and directed her to one of the private examination rooms. Cait hopped up on the biobed and waited for the doctor to come in.
She didn’t have to wait long; a human man, his short hair just on the edge of giving up the last bit of dark brown and going completely silver, entered a couple minutes later, flipping through screens on his padd with one finger. “Lieutenant Caitlin Barry,” he said, and looked up at her with disconcertingly-direct blue eyes.
“That’s me,” she said, offering a non-committal smile.
He gave her an amused half-smile in return. “Well, don’t look so suspicious. I’m just the CMO. Philip Boyce-Phil,” he said, extending a hand.
“Cait,” she said, shaking it briefly. “Apparently you’re not too worried about communicable diseases.”
“Got any?” he asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said, and tried for an innocent face.
It didn’t work. “Your records say you haven’t been in for a physical in over a year. Any good reason?”
“Uh . . .” Cait tried to scare up an excuse that wasn’t ‘I didn’t want to’ and failed. “No.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Believe me, Lieutenant Barry, I will not be as easy to manipulate as the medical staff on the Aquino.” He gave her what even the newest cadet would recognize as a Glare of Death.
“I do believe you, sir,” she said.
“Good,” he said, and smiled again.
Cait suspected that the Glare of Death and the Grumpy Doctor routine were all, if not precisely for show, then certainly a work persona, but she certainly wasn’t going to try to cross him this early on.
However, at the end of the interview/checkup/torture session (no, thank you, she did not want to provide him with the number of sexual partners she’d had in the last year), he set the padd down and said, “All right, one more thing to discuss, and this is not in my capacity as CMO but my capacity as unofficial ship bartender. You’re the new chief engineer. What are your views on engine-room hooch?”
Cait raised an eyebrow as far as she possibly could, which was partially defeated by the fact that her eyebrows were near-invisible on the best of days. “Tastes like hell,” she said, when it appeared that he was waiting for an actual answer.
“You going to stop them from brewing it?”
Cait narrowed her eyes, but Boyce’s gaze didn’t waver. Eventually she sighed. “Who am I to stand in the face of so many years of tradition? But,” she said, and pointed a finger at him. “If I get a report of the still taking up more than its fair share of space or supplies, or hooch-making taking up on-duty time, or causing so much as a papercut, it is over.”
Boyce held her eyes for a moment and nodded once. “Understood.”
* * *
It took about two weeks for Cait to figure out that Captain Pike had a thing for Number One. In her defense, she was rarely around the two of them together, and was so busy stepping into her new role on a new ship that she didn’t have much time to contemplate the hypothetical private lives of her commanding officers.
And it wasn’t as if she blamed him. Number One was strikingly beautiful; it would take someone far less intelligent and observant than Captain Pike to have missed that. No, actually, she had to give him bonus points for not being intimidated by One.
What she really couldn’t tell was whether One reciprocated the feeling.
Not that it mattered.
Well, it sort of did. She had a vested interest in Pike being happy, as he was her commanding officer, and of course she wanted One to be happy. But other than that, no, it didn’t matter.
At least, probably not.
* * *
Four and a half weeks out, Cait had entirely forgotten that she was on probation. There was so much to do and so many new duties, being that she was now the head of her department. To be fair, she’d been fairly well-trained by Ashwell, but it was still a significant amount of new things and a steep learning curve. Overall, though, she respected and liked most of her staff and thought everything was going well in her new department.
So when Captain Pike called her into his ready room, she was very surprised to hear him ask, “So, do you think you fit well with the Yorktown?”
Cait blinked. “Isn’t that your job to determine, sir?”
“I’ve already made my decision. I’m asking you for your opinion.”
Oh. “I forgot I was on probation,” she admitted.
“I thought so,” he said. “Well?”
“I think I’m doing fairly well here,” she said after a moment, cautious.
“You are,” he said, relenting and giving her a smile. “I’d already decided within a few days that we’d be offering you the permanent position, and I was not proven wrong.”
“Oh,” Cait said. “Oh. Well then.”
“Presumably you’ll accept?”
She blinked. “Of course. I feel like I’ve been here forever. In a good way, I mean.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll file the paperwork soon. Welcome, again, to the crew of the Yorktown, Lieutenant Barry.”
“Thank you, sir.”
* * *
She celebrated that evening by getting drunk with Phil Boyce. It wasn’t intentional; he invited her to his quarters for a celebratory drink when he passed her in the hallway after alpha shift. She gave him a look, and he snorted. “No, Lieutenant Barry, I’m not trying to get into your pants. If I were going to do that, I’d say so. I’m trying to offer you a drink, since I’ve got the only decent alcohol collection on this ship.”
“Oh,” Cait said, inexplicably disappointed for a second or two. “Sure. Alcohol. What time?”
“Whenever you’re ready, just send me a textcomm.”
Two potent martinis in, she figured out that he didn’t want to get in her pants, he wanted to get in her head. Naturally, she found herself spilling her entire life story to him.
It was worth it; at the end, she honestly felt she had a friend on the crew. Also, his hangover hypos were significantly better than any she’d ever had before, although she didn’t discover that until the next morning.
A few days later, she steeled her nerve and approached Number One when they happened both to be in the mess hall. “Sir,” she said, standing by One’s table.
“Cait,” One said, looking up and smiling. “You don’t have to ‘sir’ me when we’re not working. How are you?”
“Good,” she said. “I, uh, I was wondering if you still play null-G ball?”
“Of course,” One said. “No one here is any good, but I play when I can. Do you still play?”
“I do,” Cait said. “If, you know, if you need someone to play against, I’d love to.” Her hands were still trembling, just barely.
“Oh, I’d love to,” One said, visibly excited. “Tonight? I mean-oh, you probably have something to do. Tomorrow, then?”
“Tonight’s fine,” Cait said. “1900?”
“Yes!”
It only occurred to Cait later that One didn’t have a ton of friends on the ship, probably due to her position. Still, it was gratifying to have the XO so interested in playing with her.
* * *
Cait hadn’t played null-G ball in weeks, but she was definitely still in shape. One apparently hadn’t played in months, but was in even better shape, as revealed by the fact that she kicked Cait’s ass in the first round they played. She also looked much better in the overly-revealing Starfleet-issued workout gear than Cait remembered-which may have contributed to said ass-kicking.
“Again?” One asked, her shoulders heaving. A bead of sweat fell from her temple, trailing down the side of her cheek; Cait watched it jump to her collarbone, and slide down until it disappeared at the top of her tank top.
“Yeah, sure,” Cait said a moment later, realizing that One was waiting for a reply.
It got easier, the more they played, for Cait to be able to concentrate on the game and not the bounce of One’s breasts. On the other hand, when One stripped down in the locker room and stood under the shower, Cait thought her head might explode.
She stammered something about a previous commitment and escaped, but the sight of One’s space-pale skin, her legs, taut and lean, and the perfect curves of her breasts and rear end was permanently etched on the insides of Cait’s eyelids. Damn, damn, damn.
She tossed and turned the entire night after the game. Masturbation hadn’t helped; she was just short of asking Boyce for a sleeping pill or some alcohol when she saw that it was 0500 and she might as well just get up and attempt to accomplish something.
She took a different route down to Engineering; this one took her past the secondary entrance to the mess, just in case Number One had decided to get up extra early as well. She missed seeing One, if she was around, but after she turned the corner, leaving the mess, Cait ran into Captain Pike.
Pike had apparently just come from the gym; he was wearing more of that damnably-tight regulation workout gear, and his hair was soaked with sweat. “Lieutenant Barry,” he said, smiling at her.
I think I’m going to write Starfleet Command and complain, Cait thought. “Captain Pike, sir,” she said aloud. “You’re up early.”
“Early meeting,” he said. “The admiralty doesn’t seem to care what ship’s time is; when they want to meet, they want to meet.”
Cait laughed, as she was meant to, and tried as hard as she could not to stare at the way the sweat-soaked fabric clung to the musculature of his shoulders and chest. She did not turn around to stare at his rear end as he left, but it was a close call.
* * *
After two more weeks of watching Pike and One dance around each other, Cait had had it up to the metaphorical here. She didn’t even need to check the duty roster; it was well into beta shift and Phil Boyce would be in his quarters. She dug through her closet, got out the expensive liquor she’d bought last time they were at a starbase just for this purpose, and sent him a textcomm. >I have Andorian ice vodka.<
She got a response about fifteen seconds later. >I have glasses, vermouth, olives, and hangover hypos.<
>Be right there.< She showed up at his door about a minute later; he let her in, made appreciative noises at the bottle she handed him, and mixed drinks.
Cait gulped the first one down quickly, with a grimace; she didn’t like martinis with olives, and had him make the next one without. By the time she’d gotten about halfway through drink number two, she’d relaxed enough to ask, “What the hell is going on between Pike and One?”
“Why is it any of your business?” Boyce asked, watching her carefully.
She sighed. “Phil, One and I were roommates at the Academy. I’m pretty sure I deflowered her.”
“Really?” he asked, leaning back on his couch. “‘Deflowered?’ Who says that anymore?”
“I do, and yes, really. So what’s going on?”
Boyce snorted and relented. “Something. Nothing. Who the hell knows? Chris is hopeless with women-that is, the asking them out part; I think he can handle the rest-and One, oh, I don’t know. She’s probably scared about chain of command issues.”
“That sounds about right,” Cait said. “Do they not know they’re perfect for each other?”
“Chris knows. I still don’t have any idea what One thinks; even when she does have a drink or two, she just gets quiet. Chris, on the other hand, can’t shut up when he’s had more than two or three beers.” He pinned her with a mild version of the Glare of Death-probably only the Glare of Probable Bodily Harm. “I didn’t tell you that, by the way.”
“Tell me what?” Cait asked innocently, and Boyce shook his head. “Would it work if we locked them together in a closet?” she asked.
“Believe me, Chris would still manage to screw that up. He’s got no problem picking up men-and hell, he even likes women better-but if romance or sex is involved and the person is any more feminine than, say, your average Andorian shen, his legendary ability to talk anyone into anything abruptly disappears.”
Shen were usually fairly androgynous. “Wow. That’s . . . bad.”
“It is. I feel like someone needs to sit down between them and explain their feelings to each other, but it sure as shit isn’t going to be me.”
“Nor me,” Cait said with a shudder. “I don’t need to get into that.”
Boyce gave her an odd look. “No, of course you don’t,” he said a moment later. “More?”
“Yes, please.”
* * *
The unfortunate reality of deep-space exploration was that there was a lot of nothing in between brief periods of possibly life-threatening excitement. Cait was using the down time to make some minor upgrades to the warp core’s processors, and One had wandered down, ostensibly to look, when all of a sudden the ship lurched in a way it wasn’t supposed to, and went dark.
Dark on a starship was really, really dark, until the emergency lights kicked in a few seconds later, with just enough illumination that Cait could see shapes. “Commander One?” she said, hating the tremor in her voice.
“Lieutenant Barry?” That wasn’t One; it was Lieutenant Patil.
“I thought we were the only ones here,” Cait said.
“Me, too,” came One’s voice from just behind Cait, and she felt a hand on her arm. “It’s the three of us, I guess,” One said.
“I was coming back from break,” Patil said. “The console’s dead. What’s going on?”
“My padd’s still working,” One said, the faint glow illuminating her face. “The rest of the ship seems fine. Actually, engineering appears to be working fine. There’s just-” She tapped on the screen. “Huh. There’s something wrong with the uplink. It appears that someone’s put a block over here?” Holding out the padd, she pointed to one corner of it. “I can’t get rid of it from here.”
“Oh, shit,” Cait said immediately, before she’d even had a good look. “The Yorktown never got the patch, did it. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck. I should have checked that a long time ago.”
“Khoury applied the patch, sir, a few weeks before he died,” Patil said. He swallowed. “It’s my fault, for not checking to see if it took.”
One looked back and forth between them. “What patch?”
Cait sighed. “The Exeter, about eight months ago, discovered a flaw in the standard ship’s programming, that allows this particular block to be put in. There’s a group of pirates, the Cambrian raiders, who block Engineering’s ability to communicate with the rest of the ship, and then take over the ships from there. Starfleet issued a patch to fix this particular issue but, well.” She shook her head.
“Are they on board yet?” One asked.
“No,” Patil said, and when the two women turned to look at him, said, “I’ve read up on Cambrian raiding techniques. There’s about a half-hour lag between when the block takes effect and when the raiders arrive via transporter.”
“All right,” One said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes to get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving,” Cait said, squaring her shoulders. “This is my department.”
“It’s my ship,” One said, frowning.
“Don’t you want to defend it?” Cait asked, deciding not to correct her on who exactly was in control of the ship.
“Not when we still have a chance to get the rest of the ship to help us.”
She had a point, Cait conceded. “So we pick Patil’s brain for a couple of minutes and then send him off through the Jeffries tubes.”
Patil opened his mouth to protest, but One was nodding already. “All right; that will work. Lieutenant, what do you know about these raiders? Any weaknesses?”
“Uh . . .” He thought for a moment. “They only fight in space. No one has ever seen them on the surface of a planet.”
“How can we use that?” Cait asked.
“I don’t know yet,” One said. “Anything else, Lieutenant?”
“I-there’s something-oh!” Patil said, bouncing in place. “Their uniforms, the outer layer: it’s not fireproof.”
“So how do we get fire?”
“We don’t,” Cait said. “The fire-dampeners are still on, and there’s nothing down here flammable enough to overcome them.”
“I can fix that,” Patil said, and One held out her padd to him.
“We’d still need something to spark,” Cait said.
“There’s a sparker in the environmental test kit,” Patil said.
“What about fuel?” One said.
Patil opened his mouth to speak, but closed it, visible in the light from the padd on his face. Cait watched his motion, and sighed. “There’s the hooch,” she said.
“Oh?” One said. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Cait snapped. God, that stuff was the bane of her existence. “But Patil here probably does, based on the look on his face, and I’m guessing it’s high enough proof to flame.”
“It is,” Patil said. “I’ve turned off the automatic release of fire-dampeners, and we should be able to get something to flame in five or ten minutes. The hooch is in the back supply closet, behind a false partition.”
“Do we have bottles?” One asked.
“Of course,” Patil said. “The finished hooch goes into bottles.”
“Rags?”
“With the still.”
Cait started grinning. “Well, then,” she said. “I think it’s time to make some cocktails.”
It was only a matter of a few minutes to assemble three Molotov cocktails, bottles mostly filled with the clear liquid, rags stuffed into the top to be lit before they were thrown. “Go, now,” One said to Patil. “We’ll take care of this. When you get outside, get rid of the block as fast as you can and get some security down here.”
Patil hesitated a moment; Cait thought he was about to protest, but he apparently decided not to. “Yes, sir,” he said, and disappeared around the corner. A moment later, Cait heard the door to the tube being opened and shut.
“All right,” One said. “The minute anyone appears who isn’t one of us, you spark, I throw.”
One was taller, stronger, had better aim, and much better night vision; it made perfect sense, but Cait was still a little disappointed that she wasn’t going to get to throw a Molotov cocktail the one and only time she’d ever gotten to make one. She nodded, and they hunched down behind a console to wait.
After a minute or so, Cait switched to kneeling rather than crouching, and steadied herself on One’s shoulder. Once she’d shifted, she realized that she was even closer to One than she’d been before, and sighed. All she needed right now was that kind of distraction, right?
Fortunately, it was only five or seven minutes after that before a shimmering appeared, not too far away from them. “Wait,” One whispered in her ear, and they did, until the shimmering resolved into three humanoid but not human forms, clearly nothing Federation.
“Yes,” Cait hissed, recognizing the pointed uniform epaulets and neckless silhouettes from holos sent out with the patch information, and One held out one of the bombs.
Cait lit it with the sparker, and One stood in one fluid motion and hurled it right at the chest of the lead invader. The cocktail exploded in a burst of flames, and Cait cheered mentally even as she lit the second bottle. One threw it, but the remaining two raiders were calling something in a language Cait didn’t recognize, and they disappeared before the bottle could hit them. It sailed through blank space and exploded onto a console.
“Shit!” Cait yelled, and yanked off her flame-proof tunic to try to smother the flames. One was frantically poking at her padd, and a few seconds later the flames went out. Cait fell back, dusted off her tunic, and put it back on. “Phew,” she said, and One nodded.
They barely had time to take a couple of deep breaths before the lights went back on and a team of red-shirted security officers, led by Patil himself, burst into the room. “They’re gone,” One called out.
The security officers fanned out to make sure, and Patil came up to Cait and One. “Are you all right, sirs?”
“We’re fine, Lieutenant,” One said. “Good work. You got here very quickly.”
“How did the cocktails work?” he asked wistfully, and Cait laughed and told him.
They’d just started the repairs when the whistle sounded through the ship’s speakers. “One? Barry?” Captain Pike’s voice came over the intercom. “Are you okay?”
Cait hit the button on the wall. “We’re fine, sir. We-we had a bit of trouble with some Cambrian raiders, but we chased them off.”
“How? Did you blow up engineering?”
“Only part of it,” One said. “We called a crew to help with repairs; Barry’s managed to reroute the computer traffic through the secondary processors and the primary should be fixed by the end of shift.”
“What happened?”
“It might be easiest if you just pull the security footage,” Cait suggested.
“I’ll do that. Pike out.”
Ten minutes later, as Cait was still rewiring a panel with One’s assistance, Pike called back. “What the hell were those?”
“I believe they’re called Molotov cocktails, sir,” One said; Cait had a wrench in her mouth. “You probably shouldn’t ask where the fuel came from. This might take some creative report-writing.”
“I’ll make Spock write the final version,” Pike said; it was apparently a shared joke, because One laughed. “You’re all right? I’d come down, but I can’t; I’ve got to work until mid-shift.”
“Yes. We’re both fine, and Patil brought some security down to make sure. As soon as Cait finishes rewiring this panel, we’ll go to Sickbay.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll stop by later.”
“It won’t be necessary, sir.”
“Nevertheless, Number One. Pike out.”
Cait shook her head, and made sure that Patil was supervising the installation of the patch before she collected Number One and left.
On to part 2