TheFerengi? What is she talking about? Why would—what’s her name, anyway?—why would Bralik be in my quarters?Pazlar shifted her cumbersome weight, wincing slightly as her body settled into a new position. “Well, I’d best get down to see what all the swearing is about.”
“We’ll see you soon,” Waen said, her tone jolly.
“Good grace,” Pazlar said, remembering the Bolian term for a friendly farewell. As she made her way down the corridor, she heard Waen whispering to the Vulcan behind her. She turned her head slightly, and caught Savalek staring back at her with a strange look on his face. The Bolian woman, caught whispering, waved to Pazlar with slender blue fingers.
What were they whispering about? And what was that look in Savalek’s eyes?Melora was used to such whispers; as the first Elaysian to join Starfleet, she had initially been confined to a gravity-negating mobile chair, and had later worn an exoframe even more cumbersome than the current model. Early in her career, she had often felt—fairly or unfairly—as though “high-g species” regarded her as a cripple. Despite the subtly contoured brow ridges that marked her as a member of a nonhuman species, it had always seemed that many of her fellow Starfleet Academy cadets had had a difficult time fathoming the essentially gravity-free environment from which she had come. Granted, the existence of a place such as Gemworld—whose null-gravity humanoid habitat had been maintained since antiquity by automated machinery—seemed at first glance to defy every known law of planetary science. Still, Pazlar was always frustrated when others apparently failed to understand that she was no more out of place in one g than, say, an oxygen-breathing Terran would be in Pacifica’s undersea city of hi’Leyi’a.
Early on during her time among humans, all the whispers and “special” treatment had made her extremely defensive. By the time she had been assigned briefly to head stellar cartography aboard space station Deep Space 9 some nine years ago, she had developed a decidedly antagonistic attitude. The station’s doctor, Julian Bashir, had offered her a neuromuscular adaptation therapy which could have acclimated her motor cortex to standard gravity—permanently. But she had decided against the therapy, having learned by the end of her short stint on DS9 that her attitude, not her physiology, had needed adjustment.
She had spent the next several years honing her skills, acquiring new ones, and then being tested on numerous short-term “specialty” assignments, ranging from stultifyingly mundane mapmaking junkets to some truly harrowing missions in which she had piloted shuttles. During the Dominion War, she had helped save 192 of her shipmates, and had been decorated for valor afterward. Immediately following the war, she had accepted an assignment aboard the Enterpriseto conduct a low-gravity science study on Primus IV.
But fate had made other plans for Pazlar. After she had been contacted by the Lipul, one of her homeworld’s six sentient races, she convinced Captain Jean-Luc Picard to divert the Enterpriseto the artificial planet known as Gemworld. Although Pazlar and the starship’s crew had succeeded in preventing Gemworld’s destruction, she had been forced to take the life of another Elaysian during the mission. In the aftermath, Picard had granted her extended leave from Starfleet to face her homeworld’s Exalted Ones, and to atone for her crime. She had spent a seeming eternity drifting in cloistered meditation, fasting and contemplating her deeds on that mission—actions that weighed heavily upon her even now, and probably always would.
Although even the Exalted Ones had finally declared the death of the renegade engineer Tangre Bertoran justifiable and unavoidable, Pazlar had continued her atonement rituals for many months—intervals known as “shadow marks” among the Elaysians, whose world lacked a natural satellite from which to construct a lunar calendar—before making her decision to reconnect with Starfleet. She had been on assignment with the science vessel Aegripposwhen Captain Riker had invited her to join the crew of Titan.
Pazlar thought her initial meeting with Riker last week had gone quite well. He was fresh from what had apparently been an unusual honeymoon on Pelagia, and had seemed eager to accede to Pazlar’s requests.
“If I take this job, the stellar cartography lab isgoing to be micro-g most of the time,” she had said firmly. “Not to put too fine a point on it, sir, but I’ve adapted to everyone else’s need for gravity for a long time now. I think it’s time that my colleagues began to adapt to some of my more…free-floating needs.”
“Agreed,” Riker had said, smiling. “There’s something else, Lieutenant.”
“Sir?”
“We’ve got a pretty radical structural idea for your quarters,” he had said with another disarming grin. “I’ve had the engineering teams working on cabin retrofits for several members of the crew who have special environmental requirements. I think you’ll like what they’ve come up with for you.”
Now, a week later, Pazlar neared the alcove that led to the door to her quarters. Or, more specifically, one of the doors. As the Bolian had said— why am I so bad with names?—the entryway stood open, and several blue-banded engineering hover platforms were visible just inside the alcove.
As Pazlar stepped into the alcove, a growing feeling of comfort washed over her. Using the wall keypad, she manually closed the outer door behind her, to avoid causing discomfort to anyone who might be inclined to pop across the entryway’s threshold to say hello. Next she made sure that the hover platforms were locked into place against the wall, and that no loose tools were lying atop them, since the slightest bump could send them flying after she lowered the artificial gravity. “Computer,” she said, “drop gravity in alcove to one-sixty-fourth g.”
Immediately, the pain and fatigue in her joints dissipated. Pazlar pushed off against the deck beneath her feet and rose into the air. Dodging the hover platforms, she glided effortlessly over to the inner door on the ceiling, arrested her motion there, and touched the palm pad set into the bulkhead beside it. The door slid open, and Melora entered her quarters.
The lights were bright inside. Coming to a halt against the curvature of the far wall, she looked straight upward to the next level, where her bathroom facilities were located. She saw Chief Bralik, the noncom Ferengi geologist, exiting the room with surprising grace, considering the room’s low-g environment.
“Whew!” Bralik said, a sour look on her face. Then again, maybe that was an entirely normal expression for a Ferengi.
“Doctor Bralik,” Pazlar said. “May I ask what you’re doing in my quarters?”
Bralik pivoted to look down at Pazlar, her eyes wide and her sharp, uneven teeth bared. “Oh. Sorry. Chief Engineer Ledrah invited me to tag along.”
Pazlar grabbed a handhold and pushed herself smoothly upward, trying to keep the look of puzzlement off of her face. “Why exactly did Ledrah invite a geologist to inspect the retrofit of my quarters?”
Scratching one of her ears—Pazlar wasn’t certain, but it seemed to her that male Ferengi had far larger ears than did the females—Bralik seemed nonplussed by the question. “Probably because I used to work at the micro-g Karcinko mining facility back in the Ferengi Alliance. I got used to these kinds of long, vertical spaces there. Most of the ones down the mines had a lot more grakfloating about, though.”
“You were a miner there?” Grasping another handhold, Pazlar oriented herself alongside Bralik. The diminutive Ferengi woman did indeed seem to handle herself very well in low g, a knack that even some seasoned Starfleet veterans never acquired. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d always thought that those sorts of jobs were off-limits for Ferengi women.”