-= Arboretum, USS Lone Star =-
Atop a four-storey country cottage – with both a thatched roof and a
roof garden – overlooking the largest known flying arboretum aboard a
starship that could go anywhere, two old friends sat and considered the
end of the day.
The ship’s captain had given the former spymaster a tour. Long ago, the
latter had locked the former’s prison cell at night. At present they
surveyed the greenery below them quietly. They had been talking all day:
exchanging professional experience and making recommendations to one
another. Now they were alone various conversations were brewing but not
yet steeped.
Felix’s laugh came out of nowhere. He rolled his drink around its glass and served his friend side-eye.
“You know what?”
Grey had learned not to trust this look on his friend’s face: expert mischief with helping of whipped don’t-give-a-fuck.
“What.”
“For the first time ever I outrank you, Commander.” Felix’s expression
was beyond smug. They were both in their uniforms, after all.
“Good luck with that, Captain,” said Grey. They both knew he could break
Felix’s arm in 2.8 seconds if necessary. It had happened once, a while
ago. “You know –“
“You could break my arm in 2.8 seconds if necessary,” Felix finished. “I
do know. But I reckon we’ve more important things to talk about, don’t
you?”
Quite deliberately, Felix pulled the face when Grey had first started
seeing Adevian. Any kind of romantic engagement was a deal for his
Keraxi friend; his people didn’t attach themselves lightly. The
grapevine had informed him that Grey was seeing someone before he’d
learned of it first-hand.
“Dr Cohen Bram,” said Felix, as Grey said: “Cohen Bram.”
A metallic silence hung between the two men. “Hot, clever and about a quarter of your age,” Felix suggested.
“I will break your arm,” Grey confirmed.
“Still.” It wasn’t insistence, but Felix wanted an answer. Grey could tell, and he knew Grey could tell.
Felix was unusually patient. Grey waited, even knowing he was not on his
home turf; this was his counterpart’s domain. In the main he did not
know what to say, but he couldn’t deflect, either.
“I’m changing, Felix.”
A flotilla of ducks moved across the arboretum’s lake, slower than they
appeared to. Grey stared at his hands; behind them, the greenery of the
artificial space blended into itself. He had never felt more present,
nor more alone. He closed his eyes.
“If I close off every other sense, I can attune myself to your mind and I
can hear you in ways you have not imagined.” The aspect of McArnh’s
vision did not change. He did not need to ask if de l’Isle trusted him.
“I can hear every thought of yours. Your concern, for example. What has
happened to me, these past years? There is love in my life; what is he
to me? You are yet a friend –“ Grey talked in his own language, allowing
the translator to do the work, for once. “–but a starship captain,
trained to isolate every difference. When I tell you that I have
changed: I have changed.”
Felix scanned his friend’s eyes. They weren’t often steelier.
“Go on.”
Intrepid though he was, the captain of the pair felt less secure as the
moment continued. Felix listened as his friend explained in detail how
they had met and interwoven, about the intensity of their time together.
“But what about him?” Felix interrupted.
Grey’s breath, which had never juddered, juddered.
“He is quite miniscule,” the counsellor admitted, making a size with his hands.
“I –“
“Uyt’frn’n {shut up},” Grey continued, with a muted bark. “I –”
A bird neither of them recognised made its way perpendicular to the
column of the Lone Star’s 13th deck. Felix drummed his fingers against
one another. He’d dedicated himself to the fleet, somewhat improbably,
when Paxan had died. There was no part of him that wasn’t happy his
mentor had found love.
“–found myself seduced by his looks; his intellect, guile, presence.” By
this point the Artemis’s counsellor was lost visually in a point well
elsewhere. His langauge began to slip into colloquialisms. “Then we
became close. Now I cannot imagine my life without such a presence: he prolot m’zubin {fills in my blanks}.”
“You haven’t said that since 2413.”
Since Adevian.
“I am not the same man as in 2413,” Grey offered, after a while.
It was entirely possible that a man could change beyond possibility. Felix considered his friend closely.
“You’re really feeling a change within yourself that isn’t just – well –
infatuation?” Grey’s look corrected him. “Fine – love?”
“It is both,” Grey asserted.
Felix blinked into the arboretum’s artificial evening sun. Extracting
information from his polymath friend, who was too smart, most times, was
always a complex manoeuvre. Before he could ask his next question his
studied friend, unusually, offered an answer.
“There are complications, his being my doctor. But the result is a
collaboration. He can occur the frontier medicine that is required; he
respects my rights as a patient while helping me explore. Give me your
glass.”
Felix obliged, glaring at his friend curiously. McArnh took it and
breathed, subtly but in some way profoundly. The captain couldn’t see
the exhalation.
“Your balance is between excitement and concern. Somehow, you were bored
with your travels; you craved a return to the Lone Star, and to your
crew.” Through thin eyes, Grey counted the railings on the balustrade
ahead of them. “You are concerned about me, but you know, as ever, I
will be fine. You wish to meet this person that evens me out. You are
considering if you will ever meet such a person. But primarily, your
concerns are operational. What will become of your mission? They will
send you somewhere far-flung, you are sure. Your crew will have to
become accustomed to you once again. You are confident but reticent.”
Felix exhaled exhaustedly, then extended his arm and reclaimed his drink from Grey’s hand.
“You got that from a two-thirds-empty glass of scotch?”
“My ability has developed into the psionic. Apparently, I can now read
from objects that have occurred some contact with an emotional state.”
de l’Isle grimaced. “Isn’t that going to be – I mean, tiring? If
everything you touch carries an emotional weight you’re going to be worn
through.”
“Cohen is my constant,” Grey suggested, a minute later.
“Then you have to let him be that. But don’t pile too much on him, G’rei.”
It wasn’t often that Felix used his pal’s Keraxi name. He pronounced the
rolled ‘g’ perfectly; not quite like a native speaker but not far off.
He was also correct: Felix had no advice to give about long-term
relationships but he didn’t need to. His choice had always been to avoid
them. Grey, who had not opened himself to anybody in some 70 years, had
two in rapid succession.
“You have a question,” Grey deflected.
Felix made an indiscernible grunt.
“Someone is on your tail,” Grey didn’t ask. “That’s not an empathic reading; a logical one. You are haunted, somehow.”
“Intel spent the last year trailing me, Grey. It’s fuckin’ tiring.”
Felix sank his beverage. Birds he didn’t recognise – an innovation of
Regina’s, possibly? – flocked from one side of the space to another. “I
get that I’m a career officer. But I deserved a year’s break and I
didn’t get one because there were spies in the shadows. Then I get back?
And I’m firefighting.”
McArnh wasn’t entirely unaware; his previous status gave him some
relevant access information, if not full disclosure about active
operations.
“Edie nearly drove Utopia insane. All of them. All the time. Two of
theirChief Ops moved onto other assignments because they couldn’t cope.
Tonx entered the wrong admiral’s quarters – literally. I’ve still got
that damned selfish gelatinous mess in the science chair, no decent
helmsman and, apparently, a novice counsellor.”
“Kn’zhk {friend}: you built your career on being a liability. Why
would they treat you as else now, hm? It is your captaincy and your
talent. Do you not see? It is your lot.”
“I can’t tell whether you’re irritating as a jailor, an empath, an
admiral, a captain or a counsellor,” Felix grumbled. “But yes. I see.”
“It is all that can be suggested.”
“I understand,” Felix agreed. Grey saw his look become captainly;
focused and in a rare way academic. “There’s one thing that bothers me.”
“Go on,” Grey invited, even though he knew, making it incumbent upon Felix to talk through it.
“If it’s such a high-profile mission, such a capable ship – why do they
shunt the mentalists over here? There’s a notch on the roster for every
personality disorder and badly interfaced freak in the Federation. Me
included,” Felix insisted. “Nymphomaniac, anti-authoritarians,
contrarians, frustrated geniuses, megalomaniacs and egotists – any type
of difficult person, we’ve got them, and not just one. A few. What makes
Starfleet think we’re the job to take the first slipstream job out into
deep space? This is a Picard job. I mean, I’m not going to say I don’t
want it, but – why the Lone Star? Why is there still a Lone Star, even?”
For a while his counsellor friend considered a response – one that came
from various angles of his experience. He was about to launch into a
categorical answer that covered most of these concerns. But then Grey
felt the call, shortly before the soundwave collided with his comm badge
and the recall to the Artemis came.
“I must go,” explained Grey. “You’ll work it out.”
Felix beamed, a CO soon to be left alone with an unfinished thought.
“u’varl kn’skit vo nm. {Go well, brother-friend.}”
Grey managed a knowing look before the transporter lifted him out, leaving Felix to simmer and stare.
-=-=-=-
by Captain Felix de l’Isle, CO, USS Lone Star
and Commander Grey McArnh, Counsellor, USS Artemis