Spacedock light. Damn.
That's what she was thinking. I could tell.
The way Tiffany Macintosh peered through all the importance she held out in front of her as she came toward us, the way she tried to hold the medical kit, the PADDs and the books she was balancing so precariously up closer to her face, the way the things were blue, mostly, like her uniform, and would at least reflect some of the light away. She would tell me that it was too white, that it was blinding. I would tell her it was the energy. Between the people bustling this way and that, straightening uniforms, checking wall-panels to see where they were supposed to be, everyone struggling down the proper chute, into the proper little corral, you couldn't help but feel it. It was electric.It was the stuff of life, I would tell her. Behind me Kidder, Ruisi, and Guire were starting to fidget and quack like a parcel of baby ducks. Preened and proper and absolutely terrified, they weren't certain whether to be proud of the single pip on each of their collars, or ashamed. We were all in the same boat, but at least Tiffany and I had sense enough not to show it.
I leaned against the wall and exaggeratedly bided my time. La Rue.
Infinitely, Tiffany would say to me, La Rue. I watched her turn heads as she came, the way she always turned heads, and the way she was completely oblivious to the fact.. Whether it was the way she walked, tall and straight whether she'd a right to or not, or the cut of her shoulders, or that steel blue gleam in her eyes...
"What?" she said as she reached me.
"I said, you're causing a scene again. We'd better go."
She looked all around, oblivious, as we all started walking. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
Passing the windows we all tried not to look out and see the Enterprise, but it was impossible. It was like doing your own chromosome squash. With the stuff you were made of staring you in the face, you just couldn't just look at the slide and be nonchalant. It was only a matter of seconds before you started frantically counting them...
"I heard it was Romulans," Ruisi said, staring out the window.
"Head up, Ensign," Kidder returned. "It was the Romulans who were attacked. Tribbles for brains. I heard some admirals finishing up as they were opening the door of a conference room while people inside were still talking and I had to wait for a turbolift--"
"Get to the point."
"It was the Bajorans. I heard the Kai ordered it herself in retaliation for the Romulans trying to blow up station Deep Space Nine."
I shuffled my poker deck. Everyone was suitably underwhelmed by Kidder's theory, and it pleased me no end. When we reached the turbolift and stood in place, there was a moment of snagged silence. So I pounced...
"You guys never know where to stop and tie your shoes. How are you ever going to get promoted? I heard it was the Borg."
...to great admonishment by my peers. Kidder picked at some of Tiffany's papers as if he would pelt me with them, shaking me down a little from my perceived perch above the flock.
"No, really," I tried to defend myself. "I heard it from Riker. You know, Riker, of the Enterprise. The ship we'll be on in fifteen seconds."
"Mr. I've got Starfleet Command right here," Ruisi gestured into the palm of his hand. "He probably just said that because he knew you were standing there, and he was checking your gullibility quotient."
The turbolift door opened and people streamed out. We waited impatiently to stream in.
"I'm telling you," I said, "I heard their ship is just floating around out there, dead. Isn't that creepy? What do you think, Tiffany? Do you think it could be dead?"
Tiffany winced then, plain as day. She shifted her load, tried to rub some feeling back into her hand. She was completely absorbed with it, the way she got."No," she said, "it's just asleep a little. It just needs a good shaking up."
So she shook it, flexed her fingers. At the ensuing silence, she looked up and around. I gave her a bit of a shove into the turbolift.
"We're not talking about you right now, Tiffany," Guire said. "We're talking about the big vast universe outside you."
"What," Kidder mocked, "there's a big vast universe outside me?"
Inside the turbolift, it occurred to me, "Which reminds me," and I searched through my gear until I found what I was looking for, and I held it out to Tiffany. "Here. I stole this for you."
Tiffany took the fossilized trilobite and looked it over. "What is it? I mean, of course I know what--"
"It's a reminder. A little adaptation might be in order, Mister. You might be damn good, and Starfleet might need damn good people, especially now, but we're being assigned and you're getting shuffled back to the bottom of the food chain, and--"
"It must be as it may" Ruisi said.
I stared him down and he shrugged out of the conversation. "I heard the Captain reads Shakespeare."
And I went on with Tiffany. "Look, I like you a lot. But if you don'tget out of there--" I tapped her on the side of her head, to great admonishment by her. "If you get out on that ship and can't find your niche and occupy it and do your job, regardless of anything else you might have going for you--" I took the trilobite and tapped it on the wall, "--you're history," and handed it back to Tiffany.
The turbolift stopped. The rear door opened. It was a controlled sort of chaos, the way people got off and on, exchanged places like ions across a cell membrane, everyone staying in the right channel and no one quite being able to explain how. And maybe it was the act of realizing just how automatic it was that threw you out of the loop that got you snagged. Maybe there was such a thing as thinking too much. Tiffany got so turned around by the wrong door opening that she nearly didn't make it out of the turbolift at all.
Damn, I thought.
Tiffany dropped out of sight, I was relieved to see, to unburden herself of her importance. When she came hurrying back down the corridor, all she had was a single PADD, which was all you could expect from her. She never left her work completely behind. I'd given up trying to get herto.
"Look," I said to her, "don't think. Don't feel. Just do your job."
And then we were there. Ten Forward.
Time for one deep breath, one quick feeling. Then I took the first step and the doors opened. Inside was crowded with people. Seeming at first homogeneous, you could tell, if you watched for a moment, who were the new people and who were the old. This was very important, after all. It was the first order of business, figuring out who you needed to talk to right away and who you could afford to ignore. I took inventory. Off by the window were Dr. Crusher and a few others engaged in conversation. I recognized her by her red hair, and the way she sat. The way doctors sat. The way Tiffany sat.
Slow and unhurried, it was the conversation of just another day. Others of the crew, however, didn't appear to be so lucky. The one who looked as anxious as we all did was Data. The PADD Captain Picard was holding obviously belonged to him, to Data, standing just far enough back from it to achieve a little distancing, but close enough to read the words over Picard's shoulder, like a kid handing over a bad report card.
Troi and Riker were there, and La Forge. They all had the same odd frozen looks on their faces. It wasn't so much the way the ensign hurried over to Picard, handed him a PADD, and Picard bowed, feigning apology, out of the conversation...all very serious, very Captainly. A couple of steps away from the rest of them, examining the PADD closely, Picard looked more relieved than anything else. It wasn't that as much, or even the way Riker used the whole thing as an excuse to get out of the conversation as well. It was more the way that something had to give; the way Troi and La Forge looked as if they would explode if they didn't express an opinion on what Data was showing them. I inched over in that direction, just to see what was going to happen. Second order of business, recognize what isn't soroutine, and learn from it.
La Forge couldn't decide whether to look at the PADD or at Datawhen he started. He kept looking back and forth. "It isn't that it isn't a good story, Data," he said slowly, "its just that," and he paused. "Well, there are things about it that bother me. You know, glitches."
Data repeated an unfamiliar word flatly. "Glitches."
"Well, yea, in the willing suspension of disbelief."
Troi compassionately relieved La Forge of his burden, and of the PADD. "Here, Geordi, let me try." And she turned to Data.
"For instance, here. When Maid Marion proclaims that she will not marry Robin to ratify a peace treaty, but that she will marry him for love, it doesn't seem consistent with her character."
"Yeah," La Forge said, "I wasn't expecting her to make such a claim, and when she did I really stepped out of the story and thought wait a minute, she wouldn't do that."
Data seemed confused. "But it would be an unacceptable personal exploitation of Marion to allow herself to be forced into matrimony to substantiate arbitrary political--"
"Unacceptable to us, maybe," La Forge interrupted.
"Let's try it another way, Data." Troi put the PADD aside. "Peoples' perceptions, their cognitions, arise from their environments, from their learning and experiences and the situations around them. The environment you've created for this story is very different from the one in which we live. The perceptions that we have will be very different from the ones that someone living in Marion's environment would have."
La Forge nodded agreement. "People think and feel and act, Data, the way their environment dictates. You can't just force your own thoughts and feelings onto an environment where they aren't really appropriate. They won't take. Do you know what I mean?"
Troi handed the PADD back to Data. "What do you really think Marion would do in this situation, your own perceptions of what she should do notwithstanding?"
Data was thinking hard. "Ignoring my own perceptions of what is appropriate, what basis do I have to decide what another person will do?"
"Try basing it on your historical knowledge of the times."
"Marion would marry Robin to ratify the treaty."
"Why?"
"Because it would be consistent with the behavior of females before her. It would be the best way for a female in Marion's position to gain power and comfort in life."
"It would be adaptive for her," La Forge said, "in her context."
"And if she happens to love him, it is purely gratuitous. Irrelevant to the decision."
"She's just lucky."
Studying the PADD, Data looked even more troubled than before. "This is more difficult than I had anticipated."
"That's what's supposed to be fun about it, isn't it? Trying to figure out how someone with a completely different point of view from your own is going to behave. You've got to be on your toes, eh."
"I suggest you pull back a little," Troi said. "Look around you, at your own environment, at the way things play out, the way they make sense, within their own context."
Data let the PADD slip a little from his focus of attention. He began to look around, pondering the possibilities, no doubt. Troi took the opportunity to escape. When she moved back toward Riker, he couldn't help but ask."How goes Data's budding literary career?"
"He's having a little trouble putting himself in other peoples' shoes."
A corollary to the second order of business in being a successful ensign, or of, at least, not being an unsuccessful one: Never stare too long at the same group of senior officers. I focused back into the room in general, to check on my own kind. Kidder, Ruisi, and Guire were fine. Tiffany was still at the door. Damn. She was turning to exit. Whether it was that fact or the fact that Data was watching her that bothered me so much, I really couldn't say. In any case, rushing the crowd to try and reach her would just have made matters worse, so I turned away to let nature take its course. Tiffany made an abrupt spin on one heel and headed for the door.
"No ducking."
Tiffany paused, then looked back at Guinan, pouring drinks behind the bar.
"Excuse me," Tiffany said.
"Regulation 37b, paragraph 5, section 10." Guinan finished withthe drinks, and turned resolutely to Tiffany, as if quoting regulations. "During the course of a Starfleet Command-sanctioned event, there will be no ducking out the door, before the Captain, of anyone under the rank of Lt. Commander."
"Look, I really don't need to be here. This is a mistake."
"Come on, Tiffany, afraid there's nothing in that black bag for you?" Guinan dropped away behind the bar, coming stealthily back with a bottle of something thick and sweet-smelling, and decidedly green. She coaxed some of it out of the bottle and into a glass, as if it might actually coax Tiffany away from the door. Surprisingly enough, it did. When Tiffany got close enough, Guinan lunged for the PADD. Tiffany, almost as if she were used to this sort of behavior, and, of course, she was, refused to relinquish it. The ferocity of her defense seemed to genuinely startled Guinan.
"What are you, part Klingon? No matter how many hours you log on one of these, you can't possibly have life that well figured out."
"I'm no fool. I know where I stand. This is useless." Tiffany turned and was exiting. Troi was trying to come through to intervene, to keep Tiffany from leaving, only there was an influx of people, and Troi was forced out into the corridor to retrieve her, calling to her before she could disappear back in the direction of the turbolift."Ensign."
Tiffany stopped. Troi came on down the corridor to her. She paused for a moment before speaking, assessing the situation. "You're agitated because you think you aren't going to make the cut."
Tiffany turned away from Troi and headed off. Troi stood her ground, speaking a little more loudly as Tiffany went. "Starfleet initiated this accelerated program to get promising cadets out into the field earlier, a benefit for all of us. You were selected because of your progress at the academy and recommendations from your superiors. Someone thinks you deserve to be here."
Tiffany stopped again. She started to speak to Troi without turning back to face her. "My progress." And then she did turn and came back. "Since you're counseling, Counselor, I expect this to be strictly confidential. My success is purely gratuitous."
And it was, you could sort of see, from her point of view. We'd had the argument many times, she and I. And I knew the story by heart. Tiffany would always start by explaining how, for all intents and purposes, success in research is like success in nature. Haphazard, impersonal, and random. It doesn't care who it makes and who it takes, she would say. Building a name for yourself is just a matter of being in a certain place at a certain time.
"A long time ago," Tiffany said, and added facetiously, "on a dark and stormy night, there was a psychologist conducting conditioning research with dogs. Forgetting that one dog was still locked in a shock box, the good doctor went home, leaving the dog there all night with no chance of escaping random electrical jolts. When he returned to the lab the next morning, the doctor found an animal behaving in a suspiciously similar way to agitated depressed humans. Viola. Learned helplessness as a behavioral model of human mood disorders. Instant notoriety.
"I got assigned to the Enterprise," Tiffany went on, "by studying P300 brain potentials in metamemory tasks, except that, after delivering a paper, I got stuck without transportation back to Bajor to run the last experiment of my dissertation. Two of my committee members were retiring and one was going off on indefinite sabbatical. If I didn't finish then, I wasn't going to finish at all. I calibrated my machinery on the people who were there, while I was waiting for transportation, so that when I got back to the lab I could run my experiment without any delay. It seemed the most efficient course of action. There were colonists there fleeing the Bajoran-Cardassian neutral zone. Since I was studying Bajorans anyway, they were perfect. Except that their evoked potentials, while being similar amongst themselves, were grossly abnormal for Bajorans in general. Thus, I managed to demonstrate that an energy source was disrupting neural activity in the region of space somewhere near the Cardassian border and the Romulan neutral zone. Now we're headed for Romulan space in the wake of similar reports from their empire, so here I am." Tiffany's spirit faltered a bit. "But I don't really belong here. Not with people like--" and she gestured weakly back toward the doors of Ten Forward. "It just isn't in my nature, sticking around where I don't belong. I'd rather go on and weigh my other options."
"Apparently patience isn't in your nature, either. Part of being in Starfleet is holding your chin up when it's what you would least like to do. Facing potentially unpleasant circumstances with grace and dignity."
"And if I don't, it's just another mark against me."
"That isn't exactly what I meant, but if that's the way you want to look at it."
End of counseling session. Stand-off.
Having finally managed to squeeze myself out into the corridor, having looked frantically both ways down the corridor before spotting Tiffany, I stomped down to her, Ruisi at my heels.
"Thanks," I said to Troi, "I can take it from here," and I got Tiffany by the arm and tugged her back to Ten Forward. "Get in there. I just got introduced to the Captain."
As we reentered, Tiffany was shaking her head. "I am not meeting the Captain."
At my controlled expression of complete exasperation, Ruisi came to her defense.
"No, Tiffany's right. Everybody knows the two worst things that can happen to you on a starship are that the Captain hates you, or the Captain likes you. The only way to get anywhere is if the Captain doesn't know whether you're alive or dead."
I decided not to notice Troi reentering and going straight to the Captain. She got a nod from Riker and an "I thought I saw you ducking out."
"That was business."
Picard didn't quite look up from the PADD. "Anything I should know about, Counselor?"
"It's one of the new cadets." Troi's gaze wandered toward Tiffany. Picard glanced up and followed, and returned to the PADD. Troi was undaunted by his apparent lack of interest. "Her future here is, frankly, doubtful. Her work is excellent but she lacks discipline. She's brash, argumentative, stubborn."
Riker stole a look at Picard and smiled. "She'll never make it in this business."
And Picard looked up to return it, not smiling. At the bar, I shuffled my cards.
"I'm not saying he's not a good Captain," Tiffany was saying as she took hers. "I just think he's half-crazy. But I suppose you have to be to do that job. Well, to be good at it." She slapped the cards down with a complete lack of appreciation. "This is ridiculous."
"This is poker, Mister. How are you ever going to get promoted?"
"Ensign."
Tiffany, Ruisi, and I turned. Picard was staring Tiffany down hard. I gave her an elbow. "He wants your name, Mister."
"Ensign Tiffany Macintosh, Sir."
"Ensign Macintosh," Picard started out, but then paused at the way Tiffany fidgeted.
"I prefer Ensign Tiffany, Sir." Tiffany's hand went to her face, her face went slightly down. Not as down as usual. When Picard spoke again, maybe it was with just the faintest hint that he was quite embarrassed at his faux pas. Maybe I was just desperate to make him seem a little more human, a little more fallible like the rest of us.
"Ensign Tiffany," he said. "There aren't many promising Betazoid cadets in Starfleet. They tend to be brash and argumentative. Stubborn. Just how is it you've come to be aboard my ship?"
"I'm damn good. And you need damn good people."
I dropped my head down into a hand, lamenting for Tiffany.
"So we do," was all Picard said, and he handed her the PADD he'd been holding. "What do you make of this, Ensign Tiffany?"
Tiffany examined the readout and was beginning to hand the PADD back.
"I'm a medical technician, Sir."
"I didn't ask you what you do. I asked you what you make of this."
She returned to the readout. When she began, it was with the obvious, and with a painful awareness that it was the obvious. "Yes, Sir. It's of Romulan origin, the transmission. It just looks like tactical data. But this isn't Romulan. It isn't from a Romulan ship. If the data are organized like--" she examined a part of the readout more closely.
"Oh, yes, they are." And she took a breath a began again. "According to this the ship was holding perfectly steady for several minutes and then banked 100 degrees in a hundredth of a second...and here, the same thing again; absolutely no roll for an inordinate amount of time and then a bank of 230 degrees on one hundredth of a second. Any ship rolls, randomly, even if its being flown by a computer, anybody's computer. The pilot systems compensate continually in a continually changing environment. There should be a small random constant changing of the ship's position in its flight path. Besides, nothing can roll like that without tearing itself apart."
She paused and Picard filled in the silence, speaking as if he were proposing a hypothetical situation, a conflict, for Tiffany to solve. "You receive a message from a people with whom you have had--" and he paused and glanced back at Riker, who had neared, "--diplomatic tensions in the past, but who have been behaving themselves of late. They are asking for assistance against an attacker, a mutual enemy, and they send you this information. What do you do?"
"I tell them I'm on my way, and I take a closer look at this in the time it takes me to get there. But--" Tiffany hesitated. Picard was beginning to look impatient. "No ship could have moved like this."
"Even a people sufficiently technologically advanced?"
"I don't care how advanced they are, they can't violate basic principles of physics."
"Even," Riker said, "a ship having help from the Q continuum?"
Tiffany shook the suggestion off. "If we're going to start accepting Q as a probable explanation for everything we encounter we're never going to get anywhere."
"Why?" Picard asked her.
"Because there's no way to discount the possibility. Ever. Blaming everything on them simply stifles further discussion. We all might as well go home."
Picard seemed pleased, I hoped; maybe it was just that humanizing thing again I was doing... After exchanging a look with Riker as if Tiffany has reiterated what they had been thinking, Picard went on to ask her, "and why would the Romulans send you nonsensical information?"
"Barring damage to their own ship that might garble transmissions or affect their sensors--" Tiffany looked up to Picard, and then, getting no indication of whether she was on the right track, continued. "I would assume that either some sort of spatial phenomenon was causing their sensors to see the attacking ship as making seemingly impossible maneuvers, or they were lying."
"Lying for what purpose?""To get us to them?"
"Luring a Federation ship across the neutral zone with faked distress calls? Ensign Tiffany, that's a serious allegation." He turned to Riker. "What do you think, Commander?"
"There was no damage to the Romulan ship, not at the time that these transmissions were sent. They were destroyed by a single clean hit. And the anomaly they were monitoring was in a remitted stage."
He turned to Tiffany. "But we might just not be up to speed on the technology of the Jem' Hadar. We can't assume the Romulans are lying simply because they're Romulans."
"The Jem' Hadar?," Tiffany blurted. "Attacking Romulans? Is that what they're saying? How did the Jem' Hadar get through the wormhole without being spotted? We have a station there. It doesn't make sense. Now I know they're lying."
Picard took the PADD back and looked hard at Tiffany. "Then again, if they were lying, wouldn't they make up something a little more plausible?"
And he walked away.Riker turned to go with him.
Tiffany stood there, open-mouthed. With Riker and Picard gone, I couldn't help but say it, looking off after them, "What was that?"
Riker couldn't help but say it as he and Picard neared to door to Ten Forward. "What was that?"
"When I was a cadet, Will, I had a very bad attitude."
"Really," Riker said facetiously.
"I had my share of senior officers who thought I didn't have what it would take to rise through the ranks of Starfleet."
Riker and Picard had reached the door, but Picard stopped just short of making it open. Riker stopped to look at Picard, a sort of and this is what you think of Tiffany look. As if in response, Picard said, "I also had a few who thought that I might have, just, if I kept my mind on my duty and didn't let myself be distracted by emotions and grudges. They hounded me constantly with impossible tasks. I thought I'd lose my mind until I realized that accomplishing the tasks they gave me wasn't the point. It was working toward that, keeping focused."
"And the attitude?"
"When I didn't have time for it, disappeared."
Picard paused, thinking over his words, before turning and looking back at Tiffany. "Ensign, I think you'd better come with me."
Without a word or a look at any of us, Tiffany went.
The corridor had quietened down. Most of the people were gone. It was time, after all, to get to work, and it showed in the edge in Riker's voice.
"Coincidence? The Romulans' profound interest in a spatial anomaly so close to where they now report having been attacked by the Dominion?"
"Romulans tend to leave little room for coincidence, Number One."
***
The ready-room was dark, darker than Tiffany would have expected, had she ever stopped to think about it. It was a comforting dark you could sit back in and do your job and not have to worry about who was looking. Tiffany stood on the subordinate side of the desk and waited as Picard waited from his chair. She stole a quick glance back at Troi, busy concentrating on the computer, on who was on the screen, the Romulan Commander who called himself Chitin and was thinking through any potential words he might offer to Tiffany just a little too carefully...
"This is all very clever," he finally chose, "if just a little paranoid. I had no idea you were such an authority on the Dominion, er--" Chitin stumbled over just how to address Tiffany.
"Ensign Tiffany," she offered.
"Ensign. Is that so? And to already be so valuable an engineer. You are a most impressive addition to your ship's compliment."
"I'm not an engineer. I'm a medical technician."
"A medical technician. And yet you've managed to construct this hypothesis based on your own theoretical manipulations? Picard, I'm surprised at you, taking so much stock in the imaginative wanderings of unqualified crew members. In the Tal'Shiar we pride ourselves on our structure, our organization. It's the backbone of our efficiency. Everyone remains in the capacity to which they are assigned and in which they are qualified to operate."
Chitin's attention was drawn off the edge of the screen, to what, no one on this side could see. He shifted his weight, acted as if he would continue, and then shifted it again.
"In Starfleet," Picard said calmly, "we pride ourselves on our ability to accept different points of view. This often helps us focus on subtleties that we might otherwise have overlooked. For example, why you had military ships monitoring a spatial anomaly."
"This is an internal matter not relevant to the situation at hand."
"It's entirely relevant if it turns out that only military ships are being targeted--"
"This is pretentious fantasy!" Chitin seemed to choke on his own words. "We are asking the Federations' help against the greatest threat to freedom the Quadrant has ever seen! Are you suggesting that you will not help us protect ourselves, protect all of our races--" and the way he did choke was almost enough to make you feel...well, it was almost enough to make you feel. Picard seemed to be trying to calm him.
"Commander, I doubt the Dominion have managed to infiltrate the quadrant sufficiently to present that serious a threat."
But Chitin wouldn't have any part of it. "Captain, you've have as much experience with this sort of thing--no, more. Surely you must see the immediacy--" and it was less of a choke this time than a swallowing, of frustration. "Your experience with the Borg. One would think it would make you anxious to see that nothing like that ever happens to your people again. I mean, so much personal responsibility." His weight shifted. A glance off to the side. "No one is blaming you for anything, of course, but surely you must feel that you," and the pause this time that was much too deliberate, the slowing of the words, "owe your people."
Picard stiffened. He started through clenched teeth, "my experiences with the Borg--" but had nothing else to say.
"Should have prepared you for just this kind of occurrence. And yet, you hesitate. I'm wondering, Captain, if they haven't managed to have some permanent effect on you. Your ability to judge threatening situations seems to be somewhat impaired."
"My ability to judge a situation has never been more sound than right at this moment.""How then can you behave so irrationally--" Picard stood to yell straight into the screen that "the only irrationality I see is from your--"
"Your standing orders to redeem yourself against nearly destroying your own people mean nothing to you!"
"My standing orders do not include--" Picard stood perfectly still. Then he sat back, his temper having melted away. His voice regained its control. "My standing orders," he said. "From Starfleet Command. Just how is it you're familiar with my standing orders?"
"Obviously," Chitin was thinking furiously. "There's been a miscommunication. Perhaps we should continue this in person."
"Perhaps we should."
"We will receive you as previously scheduled."
Chitin's image disappeared. Picard stared at the screen, after a moment saying facetiously to it, "Picard out."
Everything that had seemed so simple when she had said it, even seemed simple in the way Chitin had received it, flew in circles around Tiffany's head in springing out into the light of the bridge. She would have blinked, but she was thinking. And the more she thought it through, the less sense any of it made. And even why she was here made no sense. Why was she here, anyway? That thing back in Ten Forward, and she wanted to turn to Picard right now and say, oh, by the way, that thing back there, what was that?
She settled for "All those opinions I was so proud of didn't sound very impressive out loud, did they."
"They sounded about half-crazy to me," Picard said in walking past her. "You might make a good starship captain someday."
Tiffany nearly tripped up in her steps. I touched a couple random buttons on the helm panel, just to make the display change, just to take my mind a step away, just so I wouldn't laugh out loud, or cry, whichever came first. Troi was smiling at Tiffany. Riker, from back by the science stations, was faking a cough. Tiffany was simply headed, slowly and confusedly, out. Troi waited until Picard sat to begin offering her assessment ofthe situation.
"Captain," she said, "it may not have been a good idea to admit so freely to the Romulans what we suspect. These are desperate acts. They suggest that the people behind them are desperate."
"But I got something I wanted out of speaking to Chitin. He wasn't prepared to talk on his feet about the situation. Not at all. Even the thinnest basis for questioning their story caused him a great deal of distress."
"It's difficult to say what Chitin's motives might have been for speaking to you the way he did. His thoughts were confused. I couldn't tell if he was lying, or holding anything back. Everything was clouded by his being afraid. That much was certain. He was very afraid."
"Of what?"
"I can't say of what as well as I can say for what. He was afraid for his life, for all their lives, genuinely."
Picard didn't like the sound of this, and it showed. It only, after all, strengthened the Romulan position. And it only gave Tiffany something else to think about.
"And that's," Tiffany began hesitantly, "enough to make us believe whatever they tell us, to put ourselves right in their hands?"
Picard gave Tiffany a singular 'are you second-guessing your superior officers' look. "Ensign, the duty of a counselor aboard ship is to provide opinions concerning the mental states and behaviors of those with whom we have to deal. Do you think it unimportant that Chitin was genuinely afraid for himself?"
"No, but I also don't think it's sufficient reason for us to trust them. Excuse me, Sir, but--"
"They're Romulans?"
"That isn't what I was going to say--"
"Romulans have as much right to fear for their lives as any of us. Wouldn't you say, Ensign?"
"Of course, Sir, but--"
"But Romulan lives aren't worth quite as much as ours?"
"I would never presume--" she bit down on her frustration. "If you would just listen to me--"
"You don't always have the luxury of being able to explain your meaning at length to people. If you want them to take you seriously, to take you at face value, you'd better damn well make yourself understood." Picard turned his attention to the viewscreen. "Lesson number one."
And silence. And the impression that no one knew quite what to do, that no one quite understood.
But Tiffany was thinking. Nothing happened without a reason, she used to tell me. She didn't believe in coincidences, accidents, or spontaneity. There was, she liked to be convinced, something behind everything. So she thought. And slowly but surely it crossed her face, understanding. Slowly and surely she stepped back down to the center of the bridge and pointed out to Picard that
"Chitin didn't make himself very well understood."
Picard's attention turned back to her.
"The way he kept throwing things out," she went on, "as if he just wanted to infuriate you, not as if he wanted you to understand anything. Just to react." And she thought about it harder. "He had a difficult time finishing his sentences. Ideas all strung together, getting worse as he talked. He was increasingly uncertain about what he said, the more he said."
"What else did you notice about his manner? His posture, for instance?" "His posture? He was standing and talking."
Picard feigned disappointment. "You'll have to do better than that."
"His uniform was misbuttoned."
Picard was startled. "Was it?" "Yes. As if he were being hurried through all of this. Hurried by someone--" She thought. "Someone who was standing off to his right, someone he kept looking at, the entire time he was talking to you, as if hoping to be fed his lines."
"And what do you think I want more than anything, right now." "To find out who that was, and to slap me back where I came from, not necessarily in that order."
Picard stared at Tiffany...that was exactly what he'd been thinking.
Then he ordered a status report, and on the screen was a tactical display updating our approach to Romulan space. There was activity just beyond the border, lots of it, and it wouldn't be long before we saw just what it was. My relief came. I headed back to the turbolift just in time to meet Tiffany, to hear Riker telling her that she was liable to be joining them, when the time came, and was she up for it.
Tiffany stole a look back at Picard. "I don't know whether I want to go or not."
Riker followed her look. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Lesson number two."
Tiffany started into a smile, despite herself. She and I loaded onto the turbolift and were gone.
Riker took his seat, to wait. He said nothing right away, but then turned to Picard as it seemed to become obvious to him, that "You still think they're lying."
"Chitin may be afraid of something, but I don't think it's the Dominion, and the only way to find out what it is, is to go over there and see."
"You didn't believe their story for a second, did you?"
Picard looked suddenly at Riker. "Did you?"
Riker hesitated. He tried to settle back into his chair, as if to say that it was really nothing, but he wasn't convincing. "There was something in me that wanted to," he confessed. "Just as an excuse, I guess, to get angry again."
On to Chapter Three.