“Did I pass your test, Commander?”
Finishing the last of his water, Jaza’s brow furrowed. “My test, Cadet?”
“You wished to see how I would handle a discussion of my culture, did you not?”
“No, I did not,” Jaza said mildly.
Dakal frowned. “Then why—?” Dakal stopped, realizing his emotions were taking hold. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
Jaza leaned forward and, resting his elbows on the dining table, steepled his fingers before him. “Permission granted.”
“If you were not testing me, then why did you single me out as a Cardassian during dinner?”
“I didn’t, Cadet,” Jaza said calmly. “You’ve singled yourself out by constantly being on your guard against any sign of interest in you as a representative of your species. You deliberately avoid the subject, I believe, because despite Starfleet’s acceptance of you, you keep expecting the other shoe to drop.”
Dakal was familiar with the human expression; he’d heard it at the Academy. “Respectfully, sir, you should have discussed the matter with me privately rather than ambush me as you did.”
Jaza smiled. “The point was to have you deal with it publicly, Cadet.” The Bajoran gestured expansively at the rest of the mess hall. “Look around you, Dakal. Do you really think the people who choose this life are inclined to judge you based on your species? They’re more interested in youthan in your accidental relationship to a longtime foe of the Federation. And as you saw during the meal, we’re certainly capable of separating whatever lingering ill feelings we may have about the Cardassian Union from our interest in Cardassian culture, or in one Zurin Dakal.
“But I think you know that, or you’d never have enrolled in Starfleet Academy in the first place. Am I wrong?”
Dakal considered Jaza’s words, reflecting on the long road he had traveled from the refugee camps on the neutral planet Lejonis, the world to which he, together with his parents and siblings, as well as scores of other families, had fled after they had been perilously smuggled off Cardassia Prime five years prior, during the height of the Dominion occupation there. Raised in a culture that revered duty to the state above all other virtues, even familial devotion, leaving Cardassia behind at such a difficult time, culminating in the carnage that had marked the war’s costly end, had felt conflictingly like both treason and patriotism to the refugees on Lejonis. Treason because they had, in a very real sense, turned their backs on their homeworld during her darkest hour; patriotism because the planet of their birth had been distorted by corrupt opportunists and alien invaders almost beyond recognition. But dissidents and conscientious objectors had never fared well on Prime, even in the best of times, so the refugees on Lejonis had resolved to be patient, to preserve and stay true to the values and ideals that had first made Cardassia strong, in the hope that, one day, they would make her strong again.
Cardassia’s billion dead at the war’s end had shaken that hope among the refugees, but hadn’t extinguished it. Most of the families soon returned home to help restore their fallen civilization any way they could. But a small number—young Zurin Dakal among them—had reasoned that there was much good that could come from showing the rest of the galaxy a Cardassian face different from the one that had brought so much pain to the Alpha Quadrant. Those individuals—mostly academicians and artisans of one sort or another—had resettled on worlds throughout the Federation, teaching at universities, joining organizations devoted to the arts, or helping with the postwar rebuilding efforts. Dakal alone had elected to join Starfleet, though he had hoped others of his kind would eventually follow. In all but name those self-exiled Cardassians were Prime’s cultural ambassadors, hoping in some small way to begin healing a rift that they believed had grown too wide and too deep for far too long.
Perhaps Jaza is right,Dakal thought, and these last four years as a solitary Cardassian among all these aliens have made me forget the reasons I chose Starfleet. Perhaps I should not be reluctant to share my heritage with my shipmates, or to celebrate it. How better to prove my fears false? Or to confront any fears I may encounter?
“No, Commander, you aren’t wrong,” Dakal said. “In fact, you’ve helped me to remember a few things I should not have forgotten. Thank you, not just for your interest, but for inviting me to this evening’s Blue Table.”
Jaza smiled again. “It’s an open invitation, Cadet. Join us any time.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Dakal, suddenly experiencing a sense of home for the first time since separating from his family. Perhaps trust can turn worlds as well.
As he entered deck seven’s multipurpose mess hall–cum–recreation center, Ranul Keru tried to tamp down his mounting worries. For reasons he had yet to identify, recurring feelings of self-doubt had plagued him during his past few duty shifts. He wondered repeatedly if he was really capable of serving effectively as both chief of security and tactical officer.
Of course he still believed, at least intellectually, that he was the right person for this dual job. Though he had served in the far less action-intensive role of stellar cartographer during his first tour of duty aboard the Enterprise,he had also been trained in multiple techniques of unarmed defense, had achieved some of the highest marksmanship scores of his Academy class, and had already proven himself during real-world tactical crises on Trill, Tezwa, and Pelagia.
When he had returned to the Enterprisetwo years ago following an extended personal leave on Trill, he had transferred to security, joining the department that was then headed by Christine Vale. Had Lieutenant Commander Worf still been in charge of ship’s security then, Keru knew he couldn’t have worked under him; the Klingon officer was the one who had, albeit out of necessity, shot Keru’s lifemate, Lieutenant Sean Hawk, and then let his corpse drift off into trackless space.
No, it was theBorg who killed him,he repeated to himself for perhaps the billionth time. Worf was only doing his job, protecting the ship. Sean was infected with nanoprobes, and would have used them to assimilate the rest of us.
And yet, every time he made that argument to himself, he saw the face of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who had also once been assimilated by the Borg, only to be rescued later and cured of his nanoprobe infection. More recently, the long-lost U.S.S. Voyagerhad returned to Earth, bringing along a human woman who had also been successfully deassimilated from the Borg collective. Both Picard and the woman Voyager’s crew had repatriated had been nanoprobe-infected for far longer than Sean had been.
He could have been saved, too. Worf was too quick to sacrifice a fellow crew member, battle conditions or not.
It was an ugly doubt to be carrying around, but he had been unable to put it to rest for more than half a decade now. There had to have been another way. Sean Hawk would still be alive today if Worf had simply put forth a better effort to find it.
He knew that this nagging bitterness, this shard of blame that remained lodged in his soul like old shrapnel, was one of the underlying reasons that Keru had accepted the role of security chief aboard Titanwhen Captain Riker had extended the invitation. He had not said it aloud, but inside, he’d fairly screamed it: I won’t sacrifice anyone on my team. No one is expendable.
During the past few weeks, he had worked his security crew hard, probably harder than they’d ever been worked at the Academy. On the physical side, he had them running simulations in the holodeck, training in multiple exotic forms of hand-to-hand combat, including Vulcan V’Shan, Terran Tai Chi, and Klingon Mok’bara,while practicing with a medley of weapons that ranged from standard phasers to Klingon bat’leths to Capellan kligats to Ferengi energy whips. On the academic front, he had them immersed in language studies to free them from total dependency on the universal translator, and introduced meditation techniques from several different cultures in order to bring their minds and bodies into closer alignment.