Trek Fic: Component Parts, Chapter One.
Title: Component Parts
Fandom: Star Trek Reboot
Characters: Uhura, Spock, Gaila, others.
Rating: Teen.
Beta:
eponymous_rose, whose Trek expertise and general awesomeness made this possible. Any fandom newbie mistakes are most definitely my own.
Summary: “I assume,” he says, his voice carrying across the room, “that you are Cadet Uhura.” Nyota Uhura, from the beginning.
Notes: This story is a work in progress. I swore to myself that I wouldn't start posting until it was complete; I lied.
++
She’s up to her elbows in a damaged transporter console when the Romulan ship emerges from the darkness.
The Kelvin explodes with sound, hundreds of panicked voices chattering on every channel, and she almost misses Lieutenant Mirsky shouting her name over the comm. “Nyota! I swear on my blessed mother’s shiny glass eye, if you do not get your skinny ass to Engineering-”
She drops her tools and slams out of the transporter room, flipping her comm open as she runs. “Mirsky, you know I’m a married woman. Keep your eyes off my ass.”
He chuckles, but she can hear the fear in it. “Yes, yes, I am tormented by our forbidden love, I will slit my wrists as soon as the big scary ship has finished blowing me to teeny tiny pieces. Now would you please-”
The first blasts from the Romulan ship breach the warp drive. She hears Mirsky’s scream before the channel goes silent.
After that, it’s all she can do to put out the fires. Extensive damage to levels seven through thirteen, hull integrity compromised on levels fourteen and fifteen, and the casualties - she pushes it away, narrows her vision until there is only the task in front of her (forgetting her scorched hands, and the smell) and it is the last ten minutes of her life, but she does not panic. She does not falter. Commander Kirk calls for evacuation and she knows (the circle of fire closing around her) that she will not be leaving.
She hums a little Johnny Cash under her breath as she works, because it’s appropriate to the situation and would annoy the crap out of Hasan if he knew. Hasan, with his shameless musical snobbery and bushy eyebrows and the half-empty cups of cold tea he leaves around the house. She’ll never see him again.
Hasan will raise a motherless daughter. He can’t even heat a bowl of soup.
Nyota’s hands still. Her little girl is three years old and her mother is as real to her as the Tooth Fairy, as the face on the screen in her weekly vid messages home. She’s left her daughter a name and nothing more.
The next attack breaches the hull, and suddenly the fire is gone, vanished into darkness. For a moment it is shockingly, blessedly cold, and then there is nothing.
She dies with her daughter’s name on her lips.
++
The mid-day sun has passed, and outside the house the afternoon shadows grow long, stretching into evening. But even in shadow the air is close and thick, and inside the house the environmental systems whine in the lingering heat. Uhura removes the control unit’s casing and sets to work on the tangle of wires.
Her father’s leather chair creaks as he leans back, his shoeless feet propped up on the desk. There is a hole in the toe of his left sock. “Be still, mpendwa. I am exhausted just looking at you.”
She shakes her head. “It’ll only be a minute,” she says around the screwdriver in her teeth. It falls, clattering to the floor, and she licks the sour metal taste from her mouth. “Anyway, you’ll feel better once I get this working again.”
He makes a low, displeased sound. “I feel perfectly fine. Don’t fuss.”
She grins at him over her shoulder. “I would never.”
He holds his sweat-damp handkerchief to his forehead, striking a dramatic pose. “Lying, disobedient child! I shall suffer your insolence no longer.” He drops the handkerchief onto the desk; it lands on a slowly collapsing stack of sheet music. “As my only progeny, you may as well know - I intend to run away and join the circus.”
“You wouldn’t,” Uhura says. “Not now that the department’s finally given you tenure.”
Her father leans forward, elbows resting on his bony knees. The sun gleams gold in the study’s bay windows, turning his white-grey hair to a halo. “They would appreciate me at the circus,” he says, his lined face solemn.
She nods. “Of course they would. You can play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on the piano with your toes.” She screws the unit’s casing back into place, then presses the button marked Power. Cool air floods the study.
Her father sits back in his chair and sighs, his hand swaying back and forth as if the jets of air were music and he their conductor. “When you smile like that,” he says, “you look just like your mother.”
Uhura falters, almost raising her hand to her lips. “Do I?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “I never met a woman with a smile so smug.”
She laughs and crosses the room to sit in the worn wooden chair in front of the desk, where her father had taught her to read and write Swahili and English and Latin, where she’d listened to his lectures on music theory and composition and the insufferable stupidity of the average university student. It is a good chair; her fingers grip its arms as she smiles. “Right. Because you’re the very picture of humility.”
He chuckles. “And what, exactly, does a man of my caliber have to be humble about?” He pauses, and his smile fades. He rubs his fingers over his mouth, watching her. “My love, you have something to tell me.”
Her grip on the arm of the chair tightens, her fingernails scratching against the wood. “You already know what I’m going to say.”
He nods.
Uhura raises her chin and takes a steadying breath. “Father, I’m not going to finish my doctorate at the university.”
There is a silence. “I assume you’ve received a better offer,” he says finally.
“Yes.” She swallows. “I’ve been accepted into the xenolinguistics doctorate program. In four years I should make officer and get my first assignment.” She pulls the acceptance letter from her pocket, unfolds it and lays it on the desk in front of him. “It’s an excellent opportunity.”
She half expects him to flinch at the sight of the insignia on the letterhead; it wouldn’t be the first time. Instead he nods, slowly. “You’ve enlisted in Starfleet.”
“Yes,” she says.
He looks away from her, staring unseeing out the window. The sky is a pure, fierce blue, deepening at the horizon. Visible over the small copse of acacia trees is the waxing moon, three-quarters full and pale against the clear evening sky. “Good,” he says. “You would be wasted anywhere else.”
Her eyes go wide. “Father-”
He stands, his long legs unfolding before he walks to the gramophone in the corner of the study. His fingers brush the brass-lipped mouth of the horn. “Your mother built this for me,” he says. “She spent years looking for the right parts, making them herself if she couldn’t find an antique component that would fit. She finished it not long before you were born.” He cranks the handle on the side, and the record begins to spin. He lifts the needle, and when he sets it down again the music starts.
It is Clair de Lune, of course.
Her father steps away from the gramophone, watching the turn of the record. “Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque,” he says. “Third movement.”
I know, she almost says. She’s spent her entire life listening to her father’s music. The music he writes, the music he plays. The music he teaches, the music he loves. It is his mathematics, his action and reaction, the star he seeks in the night sky. Her father calls her his beautiful girl with the beautiful ear, and it is true - she can hear what others cannot, and that has always made her precious in his eyes. But they both know that her talents are not his.
She rises from her chair and stands beside him, resting her chin against his shoulder. “Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur,” she recites. “L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune / Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur / Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune.” She takes his hand in hers. “Paul Verlaine’s Clair de Lune. Paris, 1869. Debussy’s inspiration.”
He sighs, but she can see that he is smiling. “And for those of us who haven’t suffered through a French lesson since primary school?”
“Please,” she says. “Like there’s anything about this piece you don’t already know.”
He leans against the desk and crosses his arms over his chest, his posture one part eager audience and one part impatient professor. When she rolls her eyes, he clears his throat expectantly.
“All right, all right.” She gives herself a moment to be sure she remembers the translation, and then she says:
“The while they celebrate in minor strain
Triumphant love, effective enterprise,
They have an air of knowing all is vain-
And through the quiet moonlight their songs rise.”
He frowns. “A little depressing, isn’t it?”
She shrugs. “It’s French.”
He reaches up and touches her cheek. “Sometimes, my love, I forget how young you really are.”
If he were anyone else, this would infuriate her. Instead she exhales, something tight and painful twisting in her chest. She takes the Starfleet letter from the desk and folds it again. “I thought you’d be angry,” she says. “That I didn’t tell you.”
“That’s not why you thought I would be angry.”
She looks up. “Baba, when I was six you drew horns and a tail on a photo of the Starfleet Commander in Chief and told me he was the Devil. Of course that’s not why I thought you’d be angry.”
He smiles, but his eyes are tired. “Subtlety has never been one of my virtues.” He rubs a hand over his face and straightens, stepping away from the desk. “You were three years old when your mother took you off-world for the first time. We fought about it for days, but she-” He struggles for a moment, and Uhura has rarely seen anything so disturbing as her father at a loss for words. He shakes his head. “She wanted so badly for you to love what she loved. For you to see the world as she did.” He looks away. “Even if it meant that you would one day leave us behind.”
“I remember that,” she says softly. She doesn’t add that it is her only clear memory of her mother - the rumble of the shuttle beneath them, the green striped seat cushions, the elation on her mother’s face. And what waited outside the window - the blue-white planet below, the darkness around them, and the stars in the distance. “And just think, Nyota,” her mother had whispered in her ear, “just think how much more there is to see.”
Uhura steps forward, wrapping her arms around her father’s thin shoulders. “I’m never,” she says, “never going to leave you behind.”
He gives her a brief squeeze. “You couldn’t if you tried.” He pulls away. “My pals from the circus would help me hunt you down.”
“Great,” she says. “Now I’m going to have circus folk nightmares.”
“You can join us, if you’d like,” he adds magnanimously. “But you’ll have to grow a beard.”
A bird calls from a nearby tree, and both father and daughter turn to watch the daylight fade in the endless Kenyan sky. The Debussy comes to an end, and for a moment the gramophone is silent. Then a light on the base of the machine blinks, and it begins to play Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue. Loudly.
“I loved your mother,” Hasan Uhura says, “but she really did have the most awful sense of humor.”
++
It is their last night in Iowa, and their first night of leave since they arrived. They pile into a car, two cadets to every seat, and drive the few short miles to the Riverside shipyard. They stop just outside the fence, engine idling.
Uhura was thirteen years old when she first read her mother’s Academy dissertation. Her mother’s area of study was Warp Engineering with a focus on antimatter reactivity, and even now Uhura struggles with all but the paper’s most basic concepts. Every year she reads it again, and every year she understands a little more.
But in the midst of warp core diagrams and endless pages of equations, there are two short paragraphs of digression that have always confused her. They serve no purpose within the paper; they do nothing to support its thesis.
She looks up at the U.S.S. Enterprise, unfinished and wreathed in light, and she thinks she finally understands.
It is hard, her mother wrote, not to love the things you fix. At first you see them only as parts of a whole - theories put into practice, blueprints made flesh, broken pieces to mend. Numbers on a page. They are dry, static. Untouchable.
But then you do touch them. You have to - it’s how you survive. The engines, the transporter, the ship itself - these are the theories, the equations and broken pieces that stand between you and the silence outside. You touch them, live inside them, and soon you put your ear to the door of the engine room and hear the heartbeat of a friend.
It’s hard not to love the things you fix.
Uhura memorized those words years ago; now she sees the pale silhouette of starship against night sky and finally hears them in her mother’s voice.
“Yeah, yeah,” Gaila says from the backseat of the car, “I get it - it’s a very pretty ship. Can we please go get stinking drunk now?”
There’s a cry of agreement from the rest of the car, and Uhura shifts the vehicle into reverse. When they pull into the parking lot of the Shipyard Bar, she’s still smiling.
++
It is a well-documented fact that the xenolinguistics department has the best parties. That most of this documentation involves metrically perfect epics spontaneously composed in Klingon is entirely beside the point - linguists know how to party.
The neighborhood to the east of Starfleet Academy is a crowded honeycomb of bars and pubs - some are grand and some are cheap and some are little more than a hole in the wall with a stool and a tap, and each one is favored by a particular subset of Academy cadets. The xenolinguistics department gathers at the Royal Lion, an ‘authentic English public house’ that’s about as authentic as the wood of the Formica tables. Uhura loves it.
But then, after a few shots of whiskey Uhura loves pretty much everything and everyone. She’s a very cheerful drunk.
“My life is ruined,” Uhura moans into her drink. “Ruined ruined ruined.”
“Very good,” Cadet Davis says, popping a peanut into his mouth. “Now say it in Latin.”
“Gods,” Gaila says, “don’t encourage her.”
Gaila is not part of the xenolinguistics department, but if there’s a party somewhere near campus, one can be sure that Gaila will be there. Uhura suspects that her roommate must have resorted to cloning, or possibly astral projection, in order to achieve this effect; after two years of living together, neither of these explanations would surprise her.
Uhura sways in her chair. “Vita mea perdita est,” she says. “Perdita perdita perdita est.”
Davis pats her shoulder. “See,” he says, “this is what happens when you’re a teacher’s pet. The teacher gets knocked up and all of a sudden the happy couple isn’t so sure they want Fluffy scratching her fleas on the couch anymore. Then before you can say hey, but what about that dissertation we’ve been working on for the last two years, you’ve been abandoned at the pound with the rest of the brown nosers.”
Uhura scowls at him. “I do not have fleas.”
“Wait a second,” Gaila says. “Who’s knocked up?”
“Commander Lee,” Davis and Uhura answer in unison.
Gaila frowns. “Who’s Commander Lee?”
“Gaila,” Uhura says slowly, because sometimes Gaila has trouble following conversations that aren’t about her, “Commander Lee is my dissertation supervisor. This is her going away party. She’s taking a sabbatical to have the baby.”
“Oh.” Gaila thinks about this for a moment. “So you’re pretty much screwed, then.”
“Yeah,” Uhura says. “Pretty much.”
Davis flips his too-long bangs out of his eyes. “And it’s not like there’s anyone in the department qualified to replace her. Who’s going to teach Advanced Phonology next term? Not Martinez, and certainly not Abrams.” He elbows Uhura in the side and gives her a mocking, lopsided grin. “You’ve been her TA for years, and you practically wrote that syllabus. Maybe you should apply for the job.”
“Harmon Davis,” a rich female voice drawls from behind them, “you stop teasing my aide this very instant, or I swear I will not be held responsible for my hormone-driven acts of rage.”
“Annabelle!” Uhura stands up from her chair and throws her arms around her former instructor, clinging in a way that will be horribly embarrassing the next morning, but at the moment seems absolutely vital. “Please, please don’t leave,” she says into the Commander’s perfumed shoulder. “I promise I’ll stop alphabetizing your magazines.”
Commander Annabelle Lee is somewhat of an Academy eccentric, even by the xenolinguistics department’s standards. She prefers pastel sweater sets to the grey regulation uniform, first names to formalities, and giving hugs to giving demerits. She keeps a jar of lollipops on her desk with a note taped to the front that says, Don’t be a sucker - a little sugar’s good for the soul!
She’s also the fiercest grader in the department, a Federation-renowned academic with a mind like a razor, and the best instructor Uhura’s ever had. If she finds it strange that her usually reserved aide is clutching her like a child with a security blanket, she gives no sign. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, “you know you’re gonna be just fine without me.”
Uhura sniffles something that sounds like, “banished to academic obscurity,” and the Commander laughs.
“You silly,” Lee says, grinning. “You don’t think I’d leave you all alone, do you? And you with only eight months left until your defense!”
Davis sits up straighter at that. “So you do have a replacement lined up?”
Lee’s grin turns mischievous. “It’s not finalized yet, but yeah - I’ve got one hell of a replacement in mind.” She turns back to Uhura. “You’re gonna flip. Absolutely flip.”
“Well,” Gaila says, “that should be fun to watch.”
After that, there’s considerably less moping and considerably more drinking. As the hour grows late the instructors disappear one by one into the damp night air (and occasionally two by two, though everyone pretends not to notice), and soon the cadets are alone in the bar. Davis slams his empty glass down onto the table and says, “It’s time. Someone turn off the music.” The music goes quiet; the room fills with an expectant silence.
Uhura’s eyes widen. “No. No, absolutely not.”
He grins his Hollywood grin. “Absolutely yes.”
“Davis, if you think-”
He stands. “I think, Ms. Uhura, that this is your hour of glory, a moment set aside by the Fates in their munificence so that we may bask in the radiance that is your genius.” He steps up onto the table and switches to Klingon, his inflection flawless. “It is the night of your triumph!”
Every cadet in the bar begins to cheer, some shouting their encouragement in Klingon, in Vulcan, in half a dozen languages from Earth and beyond. (“What a bunch of nerds,” a familiar voice yells in an obscure Orion dialect, and Uhura can’t help but agree.)
Davis reaches down and takes Uhura’s hand, pulling her up onto the table. As she steadies herself against his shoulder, she says in his ear, “Just so you know, I’ve always thought you look like a wiener when you speak Klingon.”
“That’s ‘cause I do,” he says. He hops off the table. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cries with a flourish, his voice rising above the clamor of the room, “I give you Cadet Uhura, pride of the African Confederacy, terror of every first year linguistics student, and bard of the Academy Starfleet. She’s a little drunk right now, so if it looks like she’s about to fall off the table-”
The cheers grow louder, and Uhura rolls her eyes. “If I sing the stupid song,” she shouts, trying not to grin, “will you guys finally shut up about it?”
“Until next year!” someone yells, and everyone laughs.
Uhura holds up one hand, and the bar falls silent. Then she begins to tap her foot in a slow, steady rhythm. The other cadets pick up the rhythm, boots tapping against the floor and hands slapping the tables. And when they’re carrying the beat on their own, Uhura begins to recite the V’hak Ne Ki’ne Tevik na’ Tam’a.
She’d memorized it on a dare during her first year at the Academy, and ever since it’s been an end-of-term tradition. Roughly translated from the Old High Vulcan as A Ballad for the Ghost of my Fallen Companion, it is one thousand and three verses of what at first glance appears to be horrendously sentimental, horrifically violent pre-Awakening Vulcan war poetry. But in the hands of a skilled performer, it becomes clear that the great warrior epic is actually a long series of cleverly veiled jokes about penises.
Most of her audience isn’t quite up to speed on their Old High Vulcan; to compensate, Uhura is careful to make everything sound extraordinarily dirty. Davis and some of the others join her on the refrain, and ten minutes later the whole bar is singing and stomping along - even Gaila, though she’d deny it until her dying day.
Uhura’s just finished the bit about the warrior Sisark polishing his li-wun after a strenuous battle when she realizes that the others have stopped singing. Realizes that they have, in fact, gone completely silent, and are staring at something just behind her.
She turns around, and Commander Spock is standing in the door of the Royal Lion. He looks pale and grey and utterly unamused.
“I assume,” he says, his voice carrying across the room, “that you are Cadet Uhura.”
When she tries to stand at attention, she discovers that she’s only wearing one shoe. “Yes, Commander,” she says, teetering slightly. It takes all her considerable self-possession to stop herself from biting her lip like a guilty child. “I-”
He raises his hand, and she goes silent. He walks over to her table, the other cadets retreating as he advances. He stands at the end of the long table and looks up at her. “Commander Lee asked that I inform you as soon as her request was approved; I believe she hoped that the knowledge would bring you much-needed peace of mind.”
She hesitates. “I’m sorry, sir?”
He inclines his head slightly, as if acknowledging her ignorance. “At Commander Lee’s behest, I will assume her responsibilities for the duration of her sabbatical. Thus you are to be my aide, and I your advisor.” He pauses. “If you will meet me in the Commander’s office tomorrow morning at 0800, we will discuss future arrangements in greater detail.”
Uhura stares at him, open-mouthed. (“Well, would you look at that,” Gaila says from the other side of the room. “She’s flipped.”) She closes her mouth, hard, and winces at the click of her teeth. “Yes, sir,” she says. There’s a silence, and then she adds: “Thank you.”
For the first time since he entered the bar, she sees a change in the Commander’s expression - a twitch, just at the right corner of his mouth. It’s gone before she can be sure it was ever there. “I have done nothing yet, Ms. Uhura, for which you can thank me.” He nods to the rest of room. “Enjoy the remainder of your evening, Cadets.”
The crowd murmurs a ‘Thank you, Commander’ in return. The Commander turns to go, but when he reaches the door he hesitates. He looks over his shoulder at her, and their eyes meet.
“V’hak Ne Ki’ne Tevik na’ Tam’a,” he says. “A curious choice.”
“Yes, sir,” Uhura says.
He folds his hands behind his back. “While it was clear that your comprehension of the text is unusually…” he pauses, and the corner of his mouth twitches again, “thorough, your pronunciation suffered somewhat in the later verses. I trust this was due to the nature of the performance and your own inebriation, and not to a more general deficiency in your abilities.”
“Yes, sir,” Uhura says.
“Very well.” He reaches up and pulls something from the coat stand by his head. He holds it out to her. “Your shoe.”
She climbs down from the table and hobbles across the floor to where he stands. She takes the shoe. “Thank you, Commander Spock.”
He nods. “You are most welcome, Cadet Uhura.” He leaves, and the door closes behind him.
“I think,” Uhura says to no one in particular, “that I’m going to throw up.” She’s right; she only just reaches the toilet in the Ladies before she loses her dinner, and probably most of her lunch.
Gaila holds Uhura’s hair back while she vomits and brings her a glass of water when she’s done, and it almost makes up for the fact that she laughs the whole time.
++
The next morning Uhura makes it to Commander Lee’s old office with two minutes to spare. She arrives poised and impeccably dressed, her uniform bright and uncreased, her hair neatly arranged in its ponytail. She thinks she might still be a little drunk. The door to the outer room of the office is open, and she steps inside.
Her desk is the same as she left it - a bit cluttered, perhaps, but with an obvious method to the madness. She grabs her PADD and its stylus from beneath a stack of exams and walks to the open door of the inner room, her stomach heavy with dread and lingering embarrassment from the night before.
The room has been stripped, the beige walls left bare and the floor scrubbed clean. All that remains of Lee’s warm, welcoming office is the jar of lollipops sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty desk.
Commander Spock stands in the center of the room, staring at the note on the jar: Don’t be a sucker - a little sugar’s good for the soul! If Uhura didn’t know better, she’d say he looked almost puzzled.
“Commander Lee likes to throw people off,” she says, by way of explanation. “It’s sort of her thing.”
Commander Spock nods. “So I am learning.” He takes a cherry lollipop from the jar and sits behind the desk. The cellophane wrapper crinkles as he removes it. “Please sit, Ms. Uhura, and have a sucker. I understand that their consumption is considered somewhat spiritually beneficial.”
Surprised, Uhura hesitates. “Thank you, sir.” She chooses a sour apple lollipop and sits in her usual chair. When the Commander pops the cherry red sucker into his mouth, she has to fake a cough to hide her grin.
The lollipop leaves his mouth with a wet smack. “Cadet Uhura, though I myself rarely express emotion, I do not expect those around me to exercise a similar restraint.” The corner of his mouth twitches, and his dark eyes are bright. “Your amusement,” he adds, “is entirely justified.”
The social scientist in Uhura wishes she had some way to record the moment: a Vulcan laughing at himself. It’s preposterous, and perhaps ever so slightly charming. In the name of scientific discovery, she decides to play along. Keeping her tone severe and her expression playful, she leans forward in her chair and says, “I don’t make a habit, Commander, of laughing at my instructors.”
“Then your academic career must thus far have been dull indeed.” He pulls a PADD from the satchel leaning against the side of the desk. He taps the screen twice with the stylus, then looks up and meets her eyes. “It will be a stimulating challenge to coordinate our schedules for next term. Shall we begin?”
It isn’t until she leaves the office an hour later, PADD in one hand and uneaten sour apple lollipop in the other, that she realizes what he’s done. She pops her head back into the office and sees him holding a half-eaten lollipop in front of his face, staring at it as it turns between his fingers, reflecting light. She clears her throat. “Commander?”
He doesn’t look away from the lollipop. “Yes, Cadet?”
She takes a deep breath and steps further into the room. “I still feel like an idiot about last night. I wanted to apologize.”
Spock meets her gaze and holds it. “There is no need for an apology.” She opens her mouth to object, but he shakes his head. “No, Ms. Uhura, of this I am quite certain - we must each of us play the fool from time to time.” He sticks the lollipop back into his mouth. “Now,” he says, voice garbled by the candy, “if you will excuse me.”
She waits until she’s safely in the corridor before she starts to laugh.
++
Chapter Two.
Fandom: Star Trek Reboot
Characters: Uhura, Spock, Gaila, others.
Rating: Teen.
Beta:
eponymous_rose, whose Trek expertise and general awesomeness made this possible. Any fandom newbie mistakes are most definitely my own.
Summary: “I assume,” he says, his voice carrying across the room, “that you are Cadet Uhura.” Nyota Uhura, from the beginning.
Notes: This story is a work in progress. I swore to myself that I wouldn't start posting until it was complete; I lied.
++
She’s up to her elbows in a damaged transporter console when the Romulan ship emerges from the darkness.
The Kelvin explodes with sound, hundreds of panicked voices chattering on every channel, and she almost misses Lieutenant Mirsky shouting her name over the comm. “Nyota! I swear on my blessed mother’s shiny glass eye, if you do not get your skinny ass to Engineering-”
She drops her tools and slams out of the transporter room, flipping her comm open as she runs. “Mirsky, you know I’m a married woman. Keep your eyes off my ass.”
He chuckles, but she can hear the fear in it. “Yes, yes, I am tormented by our forbidden love, I will slit my wrists as soon as the big scary ship has finished blowing me to teeny tiny pieces. Now would you please-”
The first blasts from the Romulan ship breach the warp drive. She hears Mirsky’s scream before the channel goes silent.
After that, it’s all she can do to put out the fires. Extensive damage to levels seven through thirteen, hull integrity compromised on levels fourteen and fifteen, and the casualties - she pushes it away, narrows her vision until there is only the task in front of her (forgetting her scorched hands, and the smell) and it is the last ten minutes of her life, but she does not panic. She does not falter. Commander Kirk calls for evacuation and she knows (the circle of fire closing around her) that she will not be leaving.
She hums a little Johnny Cash under her breath as she works, because it’s appropriate to the situation and would annoy the crap out of Hasan if he knew. Hasan, with his shameless musical snobbery and bushy eyebrows and the half-empty cups of cold tea he leaves around the house. She’ll never see him again.
Hasan will raise a motherless daughter. He can’t even heat a bowl of soup.
Nyota’s hands still. Her little girl is three years old and her mother is as real to her as the Tooth Fairy, as the face on the screen in her weekly vid messages home. She’s left her daughter a name and nothing more.
The next attack breaches the hull, and suddenly the fire is gone, vanished into darkness. For a moment it is shockingly, blessedly cold, and then there is nothing.
She dies with her daughter’s name on her lips.
++
The mid-day sun has passed, and outside the house the afternoon shadows grow long, stretching into evening. But even in shadow the air is close and thick, and inside the house the environmental systems whine in the lingering heat. Uhura removes the control unit’s casing and sets to work on the tangle of wires.
Her father’s leather chair creaks as he leans back, his shoeless feet propped up on the desk. There is a hole in the toe of his left sock. “Be still, mpendwa. I am exhausted just looking at you.”
She shakes her head. “It’ll only be a minute,” she says around the screwdriver in her teeth. It falls, clattering to the floor, and she licks the sour metal taste from her mouth. “Anyway, you’ll feel better once I get this working again.”
He makes a low, displeased sound. “I feel perfectly fine. Don’t fuss.”
She grins at him over her shoulder. “I would never.”
He holds his sweat-damp handkerchief to his forehead, striking a dramatic pose. “Lying, disobedient child! I shall suffer your insolence no longer.” He drops the handkerchief onto the desk; it lands on a slowly collapsing stack of sheet music. “As my only progeny, you may as well know - I intend to run away and join the circus.”
“You wouldn’t,” Uhura says. “Not now that the department’s finally given you tenure.”
Her father leans forward, elbows resting on his bony knees. The sun gleams gold in the study’s bay windows, turning his white-grey hair to a halo. “They would appreciate me at the circus,” he says, his lined face solemn.
She nods. “Of course they would. You can play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on the piano with your toes.” She screws the unit’s casing back into place, then presses the button marked Power. Cool air floods the study.
Her father sits back in his chair and sighs, his hand swaying back and forth as if the jets of air were music and he their conductor. “When you smile like that,” he says, “you look just like your mother.”
Uhura falters, almost raising her hand to her lips. “Do I?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “I never met a woman with a smile so smug.”
She laughs and crosses the room to sit in the worn wooden chair in front of the desk, where her father had taught her to read and write Swahili and English and Latin, where she’d listened to his lectures on music theory and composition and the insufferable stupidity of the average university student. It is a good chair; her fingers grip its arms as she smiles. “Right. Because you’re the very picture of humility.”
He chuckles. “And what, exactly, does a man of my caliber have to be humble about?” He pauses, and his smile fades. He rubs his fingers over his mouth, watching her. “My love, you have something to tell me.”
Her grip on the arm of the chair tightens, her fingernails scratching against the wood. “You already know what I’m going to say.”
He nods.
Uhura raises her chin and takes a steadying breath. “Father, I’m not going to finish my doctorate at the university.”
There is a silence. “I assume you’ve received a better offer,” he says finally.
“Yes.” She swallows. “I’ve been accepted into the xenolinguistics doctorate program. In four years I should make officer and get my first assignment.” She pulls the acceptance letter from her pocket, unfolds it and lays it on the desk in front of him. “It’s an excellent opportunity.”
She half expects him to flinch at the sight of the insignia on the letterhead; it wouldn’t be the first time. Instead he nods, slowly. “You’ve enlisted in Starfleet.”
“Yes,” she says.
He looks away from her, staring unseeing out the window. The sky is a pure, fierce blue, deepening at the horizon. Visible over the small copse of acacia trees is the waxing moon, three-quarters full and pale against the clear evening sky. “Good,” he says. “You would be wasted anywhere else.”
Her eyes go wide. “Father-”
He stands, his long legs unfolding before he walks to the gramophone in the corner of the study. His fingers brush the brass-lipped mouth of the horn. “Your mother built this for me,” he says. “She spent years looking for the right parts, making them herself if she couldn’t find an antique component that would fit. She finished it not long before you were born.” He cranks the handle on the side, and the record begins to spin. He lifts the needle, and when he sets it down again the music starts.
It is Clair de Lune, of course.
Her father steps away from the gramophone, watching the turn of the record. “Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque,” he says. “Third movement.”
I know, she almost says. She’s spent her entire life listening to her father’s music. The music he writes, the music he plays. The music he teaches, the music he loves. It is his mathematics, his action and reaction, the star he seeks in the night sky. Her father calls her his beautiful girl with the beautiful ear, and it is true - she can hear what others cannot, and that has always made her precious in his eyes. But they both know that her talents are not his.
She rises from her chair and stands beside him, resting her chin against his shoulder. “Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur,” she recites. “L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune / Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur / Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune.” She takes his hand in hers. “Paul Verlaine’s Clair de Lune. Paris, 1869. Debussy’s inspiration.”
He sighs, but she can see that he is smiling. “And for those of us who haven’t suffered through a French lesson since primary school?”
“Please,” she says. “Like there’s anything about this piece you don’t already know.”
He leans against the desk and crosses his arms over his chest, his posture one part eager audience and one part impatient professor. When she rolls her eyes, he clears his throat expectantly.
“All right, all right.” She gives herself a moment to be sure she remembers the translation, and then she says:
“The while they celebrate in minor strain
Triumphant love, effective enterprise,
They have an air of knowing all is vain-
And through the quiet moonlight their songs rise.”
He frowns. “A little depressing, isn’t it?”
She shrugs. “It’s French.”
He reaches up and touches her cheek. “Sometimes, my love, I forget how young you really are.”
If he were anyone else, this would infuriate her. Instead she exhales, something tight and painful twisting in her chest. She takes the Starfleet letter from the desk and folds it again. “I thought you’d be angry,” she says. “That I didn’t tell you.”
“That’s not why you thought I would be angry.”
She looks up. “Baba, when I was six you drew horns and a tail on a photo of the Starfleet Commander in Chief and told me he was the Devil. Of course that’s not why I thought you’d be angry.”
He smiles, but his eyes are tired. “Subtlety has never been one of my virtues.” He rubs a hand over his face and straightens, stepping away from the desk. “You were three years old when your mother took you off-world for the first time. We fought about it for days, but she-” He struggles for a moment, and Uhura has rarely seen anything so disturbing as her father at a loss for words. He shakes his head. “She wanted so badly for you to love what she loved. For you to see the world as she did.” He looks away. “Even if it meant that you would one day leave us behind.”
“I remember that,” she says softly. She doesn’t add that it is her only clear memory of her mother - the rumble of the shuttle beneath them, the green striped seat cushions, the elation on her mother’s face. And what waited outside the window - the blue-white planet below, the darkness around them, and the stars in the distance. “And just think, Nyota,” her mother had whispered in her ear, “just think how much more there is to see.”
Uhura steps forward, wrapping her arms around her father’s thin shoulders. “I’m never,” she says, “never going to leave you behind.”
He gives her a brief squeeze. “You couldn’t if you tried.” He pulls away. “My pals from the circus would help me hunt you down.”
“Great,” she says. “Now I’m going to have circus folk nightmares.”
“You can join us, if you’d like,” he adds magnanimously. “But you’ll have to grow a beard.”
A bird calls from a nearby tree, and both father and daughter turn to watch the daylight fade in the endless Kenyan sky. The Debussy comes to an end, and for a moment the gramophone is silent. Then a light on the base of the machine blinks, and it begins to play Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue. Loudly.
“I loved your mother,” Hasan Uhura says, “but she really did have the most awful sense of humor.”
++
It is their last night in Iowa, and their first night of leave since they arrived. They pile into a car, two cadets to every seat, and drive the few short miles to the Riverside shipyard. They stop just outside the fence, engine idling.
Uhura was thirteen years old when she first read her mother’s Academy dissertation. Her mother’s area of study was Warp Engineering with a focus on antimatter reactivity, and even now Uhura struggles with all but the paper’s most basic concepts. Every year she reads it again, and every year she understands a little more.
But in the midst of warp core diagrams and endless pages of equations, there are two short paragraphs of digression that have always confused her. They serve no purpose within the paper; they do nothing to support its thesis.
She looks up at the U.S.S. Enterprise, unfinished and wreathed in light, and she thinks she finally understands.
It is hard, her mother wrote, not to love the things you fix. At first you see them only as parts of a whole - theories put into practice, blueprints made flesh, broken pieces to mend. Numbers on a page. They are dry, static. Untouchable.
But then you do touch them. You have to - it’s how you survive. The engines, the transporter, the ship itself - these are the theories, the equations and broken pieces that stand between you and the silence outside. You touch them, live inside them, and soon you put your ear to the door of the engine room and hear the heartbeat of a friend.
It’s hard not to love the things you fix.
Uhura memorized those words years ago; now she sees the pale silhouette of starship against night sky and finally hears them in her mother’s voice.
“Yeah, yeah,” Gaila says from the backseat of the car, “I get it - it’s a very pretty ship. Can we please go get stinking drunk now?”
There’s a cry of agreement from the rest of the car, and Uhura shifts the vehicle into reverse. When they pull into the parking lot of the Shipyard Bar, she’s still smiling.
++
It is a well-documented fact that the xenolinguistics department has the best parties. That most of this documentation involves metrically perfect epics spontaneously composed in Klingon is entirely beside the point - linguists know how to party.
The neighborhood to the east of Starfleet Academy is a crowded honeycomb of bars and pubs - some are grand and some are cheap and some are little more than a hole in the wall with a stool and a tap, and each one is favored by a particular subset of Academy cadets. The xenolinguistics department gathers at the Royal Lion, an ‘authentic English public house’ that’s about as authentic as the wood of the Formica tables. Uhura loves it.
But then, after a few shots of whiskey Uhura loves pretty much everything and everyone. She’s a very cheerful drunk.
“My life is ruined,” Uhura moans into her drink. “Ruined ruined ruined.”
“Very good,” Cadet Davis says, popping a peanut into his mouth. “Now say it in Latin.”
“Gods,” Gaila says, “don’t encourage her.”
Gaila is not part of the xenolinguistics department, but if there’s a party somewhere near campus, one can be sure that Gaila will be there. Uhura suspects that her roommate must have resorted to cloning, or possibly astral projection, in order to achieve this effect; after two years of living together, neither of these explanations would surprise her.
Uhura sways in her chair. “Vita mea perdita est,” she says. “Perdita perdita perdita est.”
Davis pats her shoulder. “See,” he says, “this is what happens when you’re a teacher’s pet. The teacher gets knocked up and all of a sudden the happy couple isn’t so sure they want Fluffy scratching her fleas on the couch anymore. Then before you can say hey, but what about that dissertation we’ve been working on for the last two years, you’ve been abandoned at the pound with the rest of the brown nosers.”
Uhura scowls at him. “I do not have fleas.”
“Wait a second,” Gaila says. “Who’s knocked up?”
“Commander Lee,” Davis and Uhura answer in unison.
Gaila frowns. “Who’s Commander Lee?”
“Gaila,” Uhura says slowly, because sometimes Gaila has trouble following conversations that aren’t about her, “Commander Lee is my dissertation supervisor. This is her going away party. She’s taking a sabbatical to have the baby.”
“Oh.” Gaila thinks about this for a moment. “So you’re pretty much screwed, then.”
“Yeah,” Uhura says. “Pretty much.”
Davis flips his too-long bangs out of his eyes. “And it’s not like there’s anyone in the department qualified to replace her. Who’s going to teach Advanced Phonology next term? Not Martinez, and certainly not Abrams.” He elbows Uhura in the side and gives her a mocking, lopsided grin. “You’ve been her TA for years, and you practically wrote that syllabus. Maybe you should apply for the job.”
“Harmon Davis,” a rich female voice drawls from behind them, “you stop teasing my aide this very instant, or I swear I will not be held responsible for my hormone-driven acts of rage.”
“Annabelle!” Uhura stands up from her chair and throws her arms around her former instructor, clinging in a way that will be horribly embarrassing the next morning, but at the moment seems absolutely vital. “Please, please don’t leave,” she says into the Commander’s perfumed shoulder. “I promise I’ll stop alphabetizing your magazines.”
Commander Annabelle Lee is somewhat of an Academy eccentric, even by the xenolinguistics department’s standards. She prefers pastel sweater sets to the grey regulation uniform, first names to formalities, and giving hugs to giving demerits. She keeps a jar of lollipops on her desk with a note taped to the front that says, Don’t be a sucker - a little sugar’s good for the soul!
She’s also the fiercest grader in the department, a Federation-renowned academic with a mind like a razor, and the best instructor Uhura’s ever had. If she finds it strange that her usually reserved aide is clutching her like a child with a security blanket, she gives no sign. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, “you know you’re gonna be just fine without me.”
Uhura sniffles something that sounds like, “banished to academic obscurity,” and the Commander laughs.
“You silly,” Lee says, grinning. “You don’t think I’d leave you all alone, do you? And you with only eight months left until your defense!”
Davis sits up straighter at that. “So you do have a replacement lined up?”
Lee’s grin turns mischievous. “It’s not finalized yet, but yeah - I’ve got one hell of a replacement in mind.” She turns back to Uhura. “You’re gonna flip. Absolutely flip.”
“Well,” Gaila says, “that should be fun to watch.”
After that, there’s considerably less moping and considerably more drinking. As the hour grows late the instructors disappear one by one into the damp night air (and occasionally two by two, though everyone pretends not to notice), and soon the cadets are alone in the bar. Davis slams his empty glass down onto the table and says, “It’s time. Someone turn off the music.” The music goes quiet; the room fills with an expectant silence.
Uhura’s eyes widen. “No. No, absolutely not.”
He grins his Hollywood grin. “Absolutely yes.”
“Davis, if you think-”
He stands. “I think, Ms. Uhura, that this is your hour of glory, a moment set aside by the Fates in their munificence so that we may bask in the radiance that is your genius.” He steps up onto the table and switches to Klingon, his inflection flawless. “It is the night of your triumph!”
Every cadet in the bar begins to cheer, some shouting their encouragement in Klingon, in Vulcan, in half a dozen languages from Earth and beyond. (“What a bunch of nerds,” a familiar voice yells in an obscure Orion dialect, and Uhura can’t help but agree.)
Davis reaches down and takes Uhura’s hand, pulling her up onto the table. As she steadies herself against his shoulder, she says in his ear, “Just so you know, I’ve always thought you look like a wiener when you speak Klingon.”
“That’s ‘cause I do,” he says. He hops off the table. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cries with a flourish, his voice rising above the clamor of the room, “I give you Cadet Uhura, pride of the African Confederacy, terror of every first year linguistics student, and bard of the Academy Starfleet. She’s a little drunk right now, so if it looks like she’s about to fall off the table-”
The cheers grow louder, and Uhura rolls her eyes. “If I sing the stupid song,” she shouts, trying not to grin, “will you guys finally shut up about it?”
“Until next year!” someone yells, and everyone laughs.
Uhura holds up one hand, and the bar falls silent. Then she begins to tap her foot in a slow, steady rhythm. The other cadets pick up the rhythm, boots tapping against the floor and hands slapping the tables. And when they’re carrying the beat on their own, Uhura begins to recite the V’hak Ne Ki’ne Tevik na’ Tam’a.
She’d memorized it on a dare during her first year at the Academy, and ever since it’s been an end-of-term tradition. Roughly translated from the Old High Vulcan as A Ballad for the Ghost of my Fallen Companion, it is one thousand and three verses of what at first glance appears to be horrendously sentimental, horrifically violent pre-Awakening Vulcan war poetry. But in the hands of a skilled performer, it becomes clear that the great warrior epic is actually a long series of cleverly veiled jokes about penises.
Most of her audience isn’t quite up to speed on their Old High Vulcan; to compensate, Uhura is careful to make everything sound extraordinarily dirty. Davis and some of the others join her on the refrain, and ten minutes later the whole bar is singing and stomping along - even Gaila, though she’d deny it until her dying day.
Uhura’s just finished the bit about the warrior Sisark polishing his li-wun after a strenuous battle when she realizes that the others have stopped singing. Realizes that they have, in fact, gone completely silent, and are staring at something just behind her.
She turns around, and Commander Spock is standing in the door of the Royal Lion. He looks pale and grey and utterly unamused.
“I assume,” he says, his voice carrying across the room, “that you are Cadet Uhura.”
When she tries to stand at attention, she discovers that she’s only wearing one shoe. “Yes, Commander,” she says, teetering slightly. It takes all her considerable self-possession to stop herself from biting her lip like a guilty child. “I-”
He raises his hand, and she goes silent. He walks over to her table, the other cadets retreating as he advances. He stands at the end of the long table and looks up at her. “Commander Lee asked that I inform you as soon as her request was approved; I believe she hoped that the knowledge would bring you much-needed peace of mind.”
She hesitates. “I’m sorry, sir?”
He inclines his head slightly, as if acknowledging her ignorance. “At Commander Lee’s behest, I will assume her responsibilities for the duration of her sabbatical. Thus you are to be my aide, and I your advisor.” He pauses. “If you will meet me in the Commander’s office tomorrow morning at 0800, we will discuss future arrangements in greater detail.”
Uhura stares at him, open-mouthed. (“Well, would you look at that,” Gaila says from the other side of the room. “She’s flipped.”) She closes her mouth, hard, and winces at the click of her teeth. “Yes, sir,” she says. There’s a silence, and then she adds: “Thank you.”
For the first time since he entered the bar, she sees a change in the Commander’s expression - a twitch, just at the right corner of his mouth. It’s gone before she can be sure it was ever there. “I have done nothing yet, Ms. Uhura, for which you can thank me.” He nods to the rest of room. “Enjoy the remainder of your evening, Cadets.”
The crowd murmurs a ‘Thank you, Commander’ in return. The Commander turns to go, but when he reaches the door he hesitates. He looks over his shoulder at her, and their eyes meet.
“V’hak Ne Ki’ne Tevik na’ Tam’a,” he says. “A curious choice.”
“Yes, sir,” Uhura says.
He folds his hands behind his back. “While it was clear that your comprehension of the text is unusually…” he pauses, and the corner of his mouth twitches again, “thorough, your pronunciation suffered somewhat in the later verses. I trust this was due to the nature of the performance and your own inebriation, and not to a more general deficiency in your abilities.”
“Yes, sir,” Uhura says.
“Very well.” He reaches up and pulls something from the coat stand by his head. He holds it out to her. “Your shoe.”
She climbs down from the table and hobbles across the floor to where he stands. She takes the shoe. “Thank you, Commander Spock.”
He nods. “You are most welcome, Cadet Uhura.” He leaves, and the door closes behind him.
“I think,” Uhura says to no one in particular, “that I’m going to throw up.” She’s right; she only just reaches the toilet in the Ladies before she loses her dinner, and probably most of her lunch.
Gaila holds Uhura’s hair back while she vomits and brings her a glass of water when she’s done, and it almost makes up for the fact that she laughs the whole time.
++
The next morning Uhura makes it to Commander Lee’s old office with two minutes to spare. She arrives poised and impeccably dressed, her uniform bright and uncreased, her hair neatly arranged in its ponytail. She thinks she might still be a little drunk. The door to the outer room of the office is open, and she steps inside.
Her desk is the same as she left it - a bit cluttered, perhaps, but with an obvious method to the madness. She grabs her PADD and its stylus from beneath a stack of exams and walks to the open door of the inner room, her stomach heavy with dread and lingering embarrassment from the night before.
The room has been stripped, the beige walls left bare and the floor scrubbed clean. All that remains of Lee’s warm, welcoming office is the jar of lollipops sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty desk.
Commander Spock stands in the center of the room, staring at the note on the jar: Don’t be a sucker - a little sugar’s good for the soul! If Uhura didn’t know better, she’d say he looked almost puzzled.
“Commander Lee likes to throw people off,” she says, by way of explanation. “It’s sort of her thing.”
Commander Spock nods. “So I am learning.” He takes a cherry lollipop from the jar and sits behind the desk. The cellophane wrapper crinkles as he removes it. “Please sit, Ms. Uhura, and have a sucker. I understand that their consumption is considered somewhat spiritually beneficial.”
Surprised, Uhura hesitates. “Thank you, sir.” She chooses a sour apple lollipop and sits in her usual chair. When the Commander pops the cherry red sucker into his mouth, she has to fake a cough to hide her grin.
The lollipop leaves his mouth with a wet smack. “Cadet Uhura, though I myself rarely express emotion, I do not expect those around me to exercise a similar restraint.” The corner of his mouth twitches, and his dark eyes are bright. “Your amusement,” he adds, “is entirely justified.”
The social scientist in Uhura wishes she had some way to record the moment: a Vulcan laughing at himself. It’s preposterous, and perhaps ever so slightly charming. In the name of scientific discovery, she decides to play along. Keeping her tone severe and her expression playful, she leans forward in her chair and says, “I don’t make a habit, Commander, of laughing at my instructors.”
“Then your academic career must thus far have been dull indeed.” He pulls a PADD from the satchel leaning against the side of the desk. He taps the screen twice with the stylus, then looks up and meets her eyes. “It will be a stimulating challenge to coordinate our schedules for next term. Shall we begin?”
It isn’t until she leaves the office an hour later, PADD in one hand and uneaten sour apple lollipop in the other, that she realizes what he’s done. She pops her head back into the office and sees him holding a half-eaten lollipop in front of his face, staring at it as it turns between his fingers, reflecting light. She clears her throat. “Commander?”
He doesn’t look away from the lollipop. “Yes, Cadet?”
She takes a deep breath and steps further into the room. “I still feel like an idiot about last night. I wanted to apologize.”
Spock meets her gaze and holds it. “There is no need for an apology.” She opens her mouth to object, but he shakes his head. “No, Ms. Uhura, of this I am quite certain - we must each of us play the fool from time to time.” He sticks the lollipop back into his mouth. “Now,” he says, voice garbled by the candy, “if you will excuse me.”
She waits until she’s safely in the corridor before she starts to laugh.
++
Chapter Two.